Thanks! So the tower is actually made by drawing a bunch of lines closely packed together. And it uses the tline function to sample a portion of the map that contains the brick texture. The relevant part of the code is here
https://github.com/nathanfdunn/pico8-games/blob/master/carts/drifting-keep/drift...
Yes, the wind does get pretty strong. It's meant to slowly increase in strength so it gets more challenging as time goes on, but it's very random so it can get strong pretty early.