Nice work, gives me very Micro Machines vibes for the NES. The only thing I don't like about PICO-8 is that its completely closed source. An open source alternative that seems very promising is Pyxel. It has similar retro / pixel art limitations, a built-in sprite editor, music tracker, etc.
IIRC, the browser builds of Pyxel games end up pulling down 30mb+ of Python libraries, which seems a bit overkill for little pixel games.
TIC-80 is probably the closest open source thing to PICO-8. The browser builds ran 10% slower than the desktop app last I tried. It doesn't have a "CPU budget," so it's possible to write inefficient code that works fine on powerful machines but not slower ones.
Developer console shows approx ~7MB transferred. Still more than I would have expected for literally just a small looping animation but a bit better than 30MB at least.
Maybe there's been some progress on this front.
Thanks for the TIC-80 recommendation - I really like that it supports multiple langs (Lua, JS, Python, etc) - that's some great flexibility.
EDIT: It looks like TIC-80 games pull a tic80.wasm file which is approximately ~6MB in size. I'd say Pyxel and TIC-80 are roughly comparable at least with respect to bundle size.
Yes, I'm well aware of that - but your average viewer isn't going to notice expanded resources, however they ARE going to notice things like time-to-first-byte and network transfer.
EDIT: Just to be clear since I can't edit the older comment - instead of bundle size it would have been better to say that the "network transfer size" is roughly comparable.
https://github.com/kitao/pyxel