Games & Culture · Browser game
Mikrolet Bulak
Crazy Taxi, on real Timorese roads
Mikrolet Bulak (bulak is Tetun for crazy) is Crazy Taxi rebuilt around a Timorese mikrolet. You work a 105-second shift on roads that actually exist: five routes traced from OpenStreetMap centrelines and given real elevation from a 30m digital elevation model, from a short Dili run to the 122km highway to Baucau. Spot a fare, stop for them, carry them, deliver — and the passengers knock coins on the metal to ask for the stop, the way they do on the real thing. The UI is Tetun by default with English as the fallback, not the other way around. It runs in the browser with no app store, no download and no build step: every texture is generated in code on a canvas, so the whole game is a few hundred kilobytes and boots on the entry-level Android phones most Timorese players own. The same engine runs a cycling game on the recorded GPS stages of the 2018 Tour de Timor.
What it does
Capabilities
Real roads, real hills
Five routes from OSM road centrelines, graded against a 30m DEM. Cross-checked against the 2018 Tour de Timor GPS traces — Dili → Aileu lands within 12m of the recorded track.
Tetun first
Tetun is the default UI language and English is the fallback. The game is named in Tetun and its first audience speaks it.
No download, no build step
Every texture is drawn on a canvas at runtime, so there is no image pipeline and no bundler. Opens from a link on a $40 Android phone.
Two games, one engine
The same road engine runs the cycling game on the recorded 2018 Tour de Timor stages at tourdetimor.com.
Who it's for
Audience
- Timorese players
- The diaspora
- Anyone curious about TL
Built with
