Slot Car Racing Demo

A slot car racing game that opens with a link and runs in the browser, made for the phone and just as playable with a mouse. The whole screen is the hand controller: press and hold to pull away, drag down for more throttle, let go to brake. Take a curve too fast and the car leaves the slot, tumbles and loses time until it is back on the track. A race runs over five laps, the best time stays on the device, and a ghost car replays the fastest run alongside.

The track is the parts list

The tracks are not modelled freehand. Each one is a list of real track pieces from a slot car system, with their real lengths, radii and angles: straights, curves, loop, jump, seesaw, narrow section, hump and crossing. The game calculates the course from that list piece by piece, including a bridge wherever a track crosses itself. That is why it can hand the list back: after the race, a “Build this track” button shows every piece, the total track length and the floor space the layout needs at home.

Why this sells

A product page can show a loop. The game lets a child drive it, fly out of it and try again. Every special piece is something the player has already experienced before anyone looks at a price, and the special pieces are exactly the extensions that turn a starter set into a bigger track.

The step from play to purchase is one tap, because the track on the screen and the box in the shop consist of the same parts. In a manufacturer's edition, every piece in the list carries its article number and links to the shop, and a track rebuilt from a starter set links to that set.

The chase for the best time and the ghost car give players a reason to come back, and every return is another round with the product range. A single link works wherever the audience already is: as a QR code on the packaging or the shelf, in the newsletter, on the product page or on a big screen at a trade fair booth.

Built for children

The audience is children, so the rules are strict: no app, no login, no account, no personal data, no ads, no in-app purchases and no third-party tracking. Best times and the ghost car are stored in the browser and nowhere else. Once loaded, the game makes no further network requests.

Under the hood

The physics is our own arcade model, no physics engine: a motor with back EMF, so every throttle position has its own cruising speed, gravity on slopes and in the loop, and a ballistic flight with a tumble when the car leaves the slot. The simulation runs deterministically on a fixed time step. That makes the ghost car possible and is the basis for leaderboards that can be verified, because a recorded run replays exactly. Rendering runs on Three.js, the render resolution adapts to the measured frame time, and the whole game transfers less than 350 kB.

A brand instead of a demo skin

This edition carries no brand: cars of our own design with no real-world original, our own hand controller, neutral track names. For a manufacturer the same code takes their range as data instead: track pieces with article numbers, cars, starter sets, logo, colours and shop links. A new starter set is a list of pieces, not a rebuild.