FACT SHEET

DESCRIPTION

One line

A lightning-fast arcade game about rolling a ball along narrow roads floating in the sky, the return of a 2009 Flash game rebuilt from scratch by its own author.

One paragraph

HiRoads Remastered is an arcade game about speed and precision. You roll a ball along narrow roads suspended over nothing: you jump the gaps, race through tubes and half-pipes, dodge blocks that appear out of nowhere, and find out that ice takes your steering away and lava eats you alive. Twenty-seven hand-made levels, a New Game+ with eighteen more, and a level editor with shareable packs. The runs are short, the pace is high, and the next attempt always looks like the good one.

The story

In 2009 the author released HiRoads as a Flash game, on the portals where games ended up back then. When Adobe switched Flash off, the game simply stopped existing.

HiRoads Remastered is its reconstruction, rebuilt from scratch: the same roads, the same handling, but with a real 3D ball in place of the pre-rendered images the original moved around the screen to fake a position, and without the flaw that let a fast enough fall pass straight through the road and into the void. And since the original lived in a browser tab, this one lives there too: there is a version that opens and plays, with nothing to install.

Features

• 27 hand-crafted levels, plus 18 more in New Game+
• Level editor included, with packs players can share
• A real 3D ball, with a collision no falling speed can pass through
• Runs on anything: it draws every pixel itself and needs no dedicated graphics card
• The same build runs on the desktop and straight in the browser
• The handling of the 2009 original, with its rules and its timing
• Two buttons, keyboard or gamepad, bound by physical position (QWERTY, AZERTY, QWERTZ)

DEVELOPMENT STACK

Written in Haxe on Lime and OpenFL. Fixed-step 60 Hz simulation that preserves the feel of the original 31 Hz one, with a cheat code to compare them side by side. Software rendering, no graphics API required. The same source compiles for the desktop and for the browser.

HAXE OPENFL

IMAGES

Click any image for the full resolution version. Everything here is in the asset archive too.

LOGO & ICON

ABOUT

HiRoads Remastered is made by Filippo Bodei, a developer based in Montichiari, in the province of Brescia, Italy. He wrote the original HiRoads in 2009 and has rebuilt it himself, seventeen years later.

OTTOBIT is the label he releases his games under. It is not a studio and not a company: it is a name on the box, for games that chase the feeling of the ones he grew up with.

Credits

• Design, code, art and audio: Filippo Bodei
• Original HiRoads, 2009: Filippo Bodei

Questions the author is glad to answer

• What happened to the game when Flash was switched off, and what it means to lose something you made
• What he kept identical and what he decided to change, and why
• The rules of the original that, looked at today, were simply unfair to the player
• How you design a game where speed is both the reward and the danger
• What it was like publishing a game on the Flash portals in 2009

CONTACT

Review copies and Steam keys are available on request. Write to the address above and say which outlet or channel you are with.