ZER0-G

An anti-gravity racing game I made for lot #383 in Project 0. It started as a love letter to F-Zero X on the N64, the game I played as a kid: thirty machines, energy that works as both your shield and your boost, dash plates, jump plates, side and spin attacks. The name, machines, pilots, courses, city and music are all original.

Play it: project0.city/#383. Fly into the lot and press Enter in its panel.

What is in the game

• Three cups of three courses. The ZER0-G Cup over Neon City: NEON CITY (a loop, a corkscrew and a spiral), SKY PIPE (a pipe you ride round, walls and ceiling) and THE DRUM (a cylinder you ride on the outside). The NOVA CUP in deep space: PULSAR RUN, NEBULA KNOT and ORBIT GATE. The DUST CUP in a red desert: SCORCH STRIP, RUST MESA and SAND TWISTER. The later cups are longer and harder, with courses that climb round after round and come back down, hairpins, chicanes, open edges and canyons you can ride up the walls of. Open stretches without barriers, jumps you can fly off, and an instant respawn when you fall.
• Eighteen machines, each with its own pilot and stats (body, boost, grip, weight) and an engine setting from acceleration to top speed.
• Three modes: GRAND PRIX (pick a cup, then race its three courses for points), ONLINE RACE (a list of lobbies in the lot: make your own or join one; AI rivals fill each grid to 30) and TIME ATTACK (two laps alone). Classes NOVICE, STANDARD and EXPERT set the rivals' pace.
• Three machines a race: hit again with no energy left, or off the course with little left, and your machine blows apart; the spare comes out a couple of seconds later with full energy. The third wreck puts you out.
• Drift and nitro: a drift fills the nitro gauge and gives a turbo when you let go; flying clean at speed builds flow, up to a quarter more top speed.
• A weekly table of the best cup times, shown on the title screen.
• MY MACHINE and the GALLERY on the main menu: your own machine on its stand, and every player's machine with its pilot, the most liked first, and a LIKE button (Project 0's p0.entities.list() and like(); tools/gallery_snapshot.mjs keeps a copy for where those are missing).

Controls

Key	Action
Up or W	accelerate (press it right on GO for a rocket start)
Left / Right or A / D	steer
Down or S	brake (in the air: nose down)
Space + steering	drift (6% slower; a SHIFT press ends it; taken while a nitro burns, it earns nothing until the nitro is spent): steering moves its angle (on through straight to the other side), letting go of the steering holds it, straight for a moment ends it; let go of Space for a turbo
Shift	nitro: a cell per press; held, it fires whenever a cell is ready and burns another every second. A chain started with two cells in the gauge becomes a DOUBLE, with three or more a MEGA NITRO
Q / E	slide into a turn; double tap for a side attack
F	spin attack
C	near or far camera
Backspace twice	leave the race

Menus: arrows or WASD to move, Space to choose, Backspace to go back, Q / E for the engine setting. In the online lobby, I invites a friend (the lobby travels with the invitation, and whoever comes in by it lands in it) and O offers a duel for tokens: whoever finishes ahead in the next online race wins, and both games report the same winner from the shared finish times. The mouse works in the menus too: point at a card, a machine, a course or a button and click it.

How it runs

ZER0-G is a Project 0 experience: the game runs in a sandboxed web worker with three.js r186 and the p0 API (input, the screen overlay, a shared session for online play, scores and the weekly table). experience/main.js is the entry point and experience/experience.json is its manifest. There is no build step for the platform: the server bundles the folder when it is published.

Each course says which world it runs in (env in its JSON: the city, space or the desert), and experience/environments.js builds that world round it. experience/clearance.js keeps the stands, the screens, the ribbons and the director's cameras out of the road's way, so a course can use the whole lot. The course cards' pictures are rendered from the real track meshes when the game starts (experience/heroes.js).

The lot is also visible from the street as a smaller build (lods/): the arena as a diorama with sixteen machines racing the course on the world clock.

Your own machine

Players can bring a machine of their own: their AI agent makes it as a Project 0 entity (a "machine" for the game zer0-g) and it appears on their select screen, marked YOURS, and in online races. The rules are one module, experience/entity_rules.js, run by the game, the agents and the server alike; entity/ holds what the game publishes (rules.json, the agents' skill.md, an example) and entity/make_kind.mjs writes them. An agent reads the live skill at https://project0.city/api/games/zer0-g/skill.md.

Running it locally

You need Node.js 20+, Python 3 and a Chromium browser.

npm install
npm run harness      # bundles the experience with a stand-in for the p0 API
npm run serve        # python -m http.server 8383

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