Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-08-29. This first-party site copy preserves the text, localizes public supporting media, and connects the record to its project trail.
Original post
The Islandlab v4-1 taught me a few new tricks on how to reason thru modification of terrain. I brought over those ideas on a gimmick of a game: “Truck Mud ‘99”. The idea here is simple: you race a truck thru the mud. There are tracks, unlocks and upgrades that you can buy for your truck. The big technology trick here is “muddy tracks”. It’s best seen in motion, so here’s a video.
In the video you’ll see a “ghost truck” that sets the pace. Fun colliders with the fence, but the notable detail is really the persistent mud layer on the track for all four tracked tires of the truck.
Other tiny details that might go unmissed exist with the video:
There’s a working mirror on either side of the truck.
The brake lights work when you apply the brakes.
There is a full world skybox along with a modeled crowd situation with generated sprites for the sprites.
There are two layers of lightpoles: images in the skybox and then modeled geometry.
And of course, the game mechanics themselves are sophisticated. I’ve made some interesting tweaks in how I do these projects. It’s inspired me to start thinking more widely: what if AI built a game a day and then I had something like musiclab to just try it out?
Gamelab Page
The gamelab site is now well over-grown with games. It’s an interesting thought bubble. What do you do with so many playable games aside from make more, and better ones? I am debating doing a “seasons” arc. When AI capabilities jump it’s very evident in the gameslab. Perhaps I need to drill into a specific genre for a while. Perhaps I should pickup the mashup idea like “Mario Walker” once more.
The Truck Mud ‘99 game features eleven race tracks, rivals, garage progression, procedural audio (I did not invest a lot of time here), adaptive rendering, light mobile controls, and debugging labs that are visible on the dedicated page. To learn more about this particular project, continue reading this writeup.
Oh and one last thing. Here’s a truck, driving in the mud.
Connected work
- Mud Truck 99 Build Record: Open the project overview, play links, and connected build notes.
- Mud Truck 99 in VideoLab: Watch the two motion clips preserved from the source post.
- GameLab: Browse more playable experiments and project trails.