Here we go...
I guess this is sort of my first Cemetech contest! (We'll pretend that one where my calculator kept resetting and I lost all of the code and then gave up didn't happen - sorry Oxiti8)
The basic concept I came up with when I first read the article was some sort of view of a road with interesting vehicles / other fun easter eggs going by. Sort of like the flying toaster screensaver, with some funny moving visuals. I probably should've posted this earlier (Sorry Hot_Dog I really promise I was not trying to copy your idea) but I was working on getting some of the underlying code done before I decided whether or not I was going to make an entry.

Current Progress:
I spent the first few days working mostly on designing some sprites. The code for the the idea really isn't too difficult, so I wanted to put some effort into making it look at least somewhat nice I guess. I got a background working with a day / night appearance based on the calculator clock, some various sky stuff, and I'd like to maybe incorporate a weather element as well at some point. Here's the basic background at day / night:


Next, I needed to add some cars. This took a little bit of messing around but eventually I got it working. I ran into a few interesting bugs that I thought were too funny not to share:


As you can see, I've only three cars right now but I'm hoping to add some more funny things to go on the road before the end of the contest. Feel free to suggest anything and just go crazy and I'll try to add it. Here's a proper screenshot of the current (actually working) program:


For anyone curious, the project is currently written in C and is currently around 6000 bytes (Mostly because of all the sprites). Since it's a pretty sprite-heavy program that'll make up most of the final size but it isn't too bad thanks to compression, and it runs smoothly too

How fun! It's a battle of the watch-cars-on-the-road programs!


Well, when I saw the upside-down trucks, my mind instantly jumped to vehicle crashes. Maybe sometimes there's a swerving drunk driver, and then if he hits something, they spin in the air and hit the ground! Then the rescue teams need to come by, probably some police too, but especially we have to wait for a tow truck. The lanes are narrower with the crash, so cars have to go around the crashed vehicles, and a traffic jam builds. Then, by the time a tow truck has arrived, a traffic-jam of 50+ tightly packed cars will go through.

And if a truck carrying something explosive gets hit by a drunk driver (or is driven by one!) then it EXPLODES! (and vehicles around it!) Then we need multiple tow trucks to get all of the vehicles that exploded and block all the lanes.

Maybe with a weather system and icy roads, cars sometimes lose control, so drunkenness isn't the only factor!

Anyway, I hope you have fun

Quite a coincidence, but no worries, I understand that we just happened to come up with similar ideas

Looks really good by the way!

This looks great! are the lines below the clouds intentional? Is there an animated gif for the vehicle crash?

Thanks for the suggestion, VitalAsh! I think it could definitely liven it up a bit and I'll try to find a funny way to incorporate it if it doesn't prove to be too much of a coding challenge. I might not be able to reach the full scope of everything but it's definitely something I want to try to include.

Thanks for understanding Hot_Dog, your idea is looking really good too

Calculatordream: I'm glad you like it Currently there's no vehicle crash yet, that was just suggested by VitalAsh. The lines under the clouds are intentional since I thought they looked a little better that way, but I could remove them if people don't really care for them. Let me know!

I forgot to mention, your bugs were indeed (in your own words) too funny, definitely some lols there

Looks nice !!
Maybe should you try to take benefit of the "bugs" to implement car/truck crashes.
As proposed by VitalAsh, explosions would add a lot of interesting visual stuff on the screen.

Wow!!! This looks amazing TIny_Hacker, I like the sprites you are using. If you don't mind me asking, where are you getting your sprite from?

Edit: I saw that you stated you created the sprites in the first post. Apologies for the redundant question, but great work so far!

I'm glad you like it! I've made all the sprites myself.

Well looks like I know what will be character #320 in Pokéwalrus Pink Version.

More seriously, this looks pretty cool and I can't wait to try the final product.

Thanks for the kind words! I'm honestly surprised that (as far as I'm aware of) there wasn't already a car walrii, given the vast number of walrii variants that already exist.

Update!
I added snow today, which will fall if the calculator's date is anywhere between November to March (I think, maybe a slightly different window but I can't quite remember). For now this is simply a graphical feature but I'd like to add some way for the cars to interact with it (maybe a crash similar to what VitalAsh suggested). The snow will collect somewhere on the ground, meaning that the area can fill up over time. I ended up doing something kind of interesting to preserve the snow on the background without needing to keep track of the locations, where I essentially always kept a copy of the background (tilemap plus snow, minus the cars and clouds) in the Graphx buffer, then used the SPI controller to disable LCD updates while I drew all the cars and clouds to keep it smooth, even without access to the buffer. Here's how it looks:


While I was working with the snow, I broke something and ended up with a massive snowflake object. I don't think it's snowed this hard since the last ice age


I also added another new vehicle today - can you guess where the inspiration came from?

Wow! Cool snow effect, especially the accumulation effect!

Update 💥
It's basically the last day (IDK how much I plan on doing tomorrow), so I'm trying to add as many random funny things as I can! I spent a lot longer than I'd like to admit working on explosions when cars crash, which was both hilarious and very annoying at times. Here's what I've done:



Here's a bug which I am sadly not including in the final version:



ANOTHER UPDATE (edit)
I added some more cars:

love the crashes! you should include the bug!

I like it. Well done! I like your pixel art and, of course, the "DCE9" flag, lol!

Here we go...
Welp, here's the final update!

I've added some more funny cars and touched things up a bit, along with making the source public on GitHub. You can also download it here, once it's been approved to the Cemetech file archives.

Here's one last screenshot:


Thanks for all the nice compliments and suggestions, and good luck to everyone competing in the contest! There were so many great submissions, and it's nice to see all the activity in the community as well.

Be sure to try it out for yourself and let me know what you think, and give all the other entries a try during the community vote phase as well!

I ran the program and got a few explosions! It was a fun sight.