Months ago, when I heard that the legendary JS1k game jam would not be continuing, I talked it over with some other devs and decided to help fill the void we would host a 2k game jam on itch called 2kPlus Jam. The primary goal of this comp was to create a game that fits entirely in a 2 kilobyte zip file. That is incredibly small, for point of reference a 3.5 floppy disk could hold over 700 of these games.

My entry, Hue Jumper, is an homage to 80’s racing game rendering technology. The 3D graphics and physics engine was implemented from scratch in pure JavaScript. I also spent ungodly hours tweaking the gameplay and visuals.

The theme for the game jam was “Shift” which I incorporated by shifting the hue for the world’s color when the player crosses a checkpoint. I imagined that crossing a checkpoint was fictionally like shifting or jumping into a new dimension with a different hue, which is how I came up with the name “Hue Jumper”.

This post is going to be a bit long because it contains the JavaScript code for my game in it’s entirety. The code is already well commented so I’m not going to explain every line of it nor are you expected to read through all the code now. Instead my goal is to explain how it works, why I made it this way, and walk you through the overall structure. This same code is on CodePen for you to play around with live. So please continue reading, buckle up, and hold onto your butts!