Drive under the lean

ColecoVision GX is a licensed revival of the ColecoVision name. We make small retro-style games that play in your browser, with no install and no account. Starting today, we're going through them one a week. Each week gets one game: a devlog post like this one on how it works, a few posts through the week, a gameplay video on Friday, and a small challenge you can join in the replies.

First up: Tire Stack. Tires come down a conveyor over a warehouse dock at night, you catch them on a pallet dolly, and you wheel the load to a bay at either end before it goes over. Three topples and your shift is done.

You can play it at colecovisiongx.com/library. It runs in your browser. No install, no account. A shift takes about a minute.

The whole game lives in the pile. It balances on the dolly as an upside-down pendulum, so every catch that lands off-center gives it a push, and the push gets worse as the stack gets taller. The tutorial tells you to drive under the lean. That is good advice and it is also slightly misleading, because repositioning the dolly on its own will not save a load that is already going.

What saves it is acceleration. The simulation feeds the dolly's acceleration into the lean, the way you balance a broom on your palm, so a load falling to the right is rescued by accelerating to the right. Hold a constant speed and the pile feels nothing at all. Starts, stops and changes of direction are the only inputs it reacts to. Once you know that, the panic move stops being get under it and becomes push the way it is falling, which feels wrong for about three attempts and then feels obvious.

Height is the other half of it. A short load with a small offset wobbles and settles on its own, and the identical offset on a tall load runs away. So two tires forgive a bad catch and six do not, and the moment the game seems to turn against you is usually the moment you stacked past what that margin covers.

The bays are gentler than the open floor. Park in one and the load picks up extra damping, so the jolt of arriving will not tip you over. It bleeds off the wobble and leaves the crookedness, which means a lopsided load stays lopsided until you catch something on the other side, deliver, or dump. Dumping is free, by the way. You lose the load and keep the life.

Then there is the scoring, which is the part I did not expect. A delivery pays the sum of each tire's position in the stack, counted from the bottom, times what that tire is worth. Truck tires and kart tires are worth double. So the same five tires pay differently depending on the order you caught them in, and a truck tire sitting on top of a standard one pays more than the same truck tire underneath it. Stacking order is a scoring decision you are making whether you know it or not.

It speeds up too. Tires start about two seconds apart and are arriving under a second by the hundred-second mark, the belt runs quicker, and the tires fall faster on top of that. Truck tires join the mix twenty seconds in and kart tires at forty-five, so the heavy ones that kick the lean hardest show up right about when your stack is tall enough to care.

Play a shift and see what you get. colecovisiongx.com/library

This week's challenge is the shift report. Play one shift of Tire Stack, then reply to any of our posts with the number the clipboard gives you at the end.