Why a top-down driving game
The goal is a short city-driving game that runs in a browser, with pickups, a timer and escalating police pressure.
A top-down city keeps the scene and controls compact. The implementation uses simple geometric shapes; frame rate on low-end laptops has not been benchmarked across devices.
Arcade physics in a few lines
The car uses a simple model: velocity is split into forward and sideways components, and sideways grip is reduced while the handbrake is held. That one rule produces convincing drifts.
Buildings are axis-aligned blocks on a grid, so collisions are cheap circle-vs-rectangle tests with a bounce that bleeds speed.
Police that feel fair
Police steer toward a point slightly ahead of the player rather than at the player, which makes them cut corners and feel smart. They are capped per heat level and spawn off-screen so you are never ambushed unfairly.
Example prompts
These examples describe the game design and are not a preserved transcript of the build session. Build duration and performance across devices have not been independently measured.
City + car. Single-file HTML5 canvas game: top-down city driving. Generate a grid city of blocks and roads from a seeded PRNG. Arcade car physics with forward/lateral velocity and a handbrake that reduces lateral grip. Camera follows the car. No external assets.
Chase loop. Add a pickup marker with an off-screen arrow, a countdown clock, and a heat level that rises with each pickup and spawns police cars off-screen that steer toward a point ahead of the player. Score is cash.