A build-a-car driving game for a 3 to 5 year old. One HTML file, zero dependencies, works offline, made for an iPad in a car seat.
Play it: https://zacker3310.github.io/vroom/
- Zero required reading. Icons, pictures, and numerals only.
- Nothing to lose. No fail states, no game-overs. Stars only go up, crashes are comedy.
- Every tap answers instantly with motion and sound. Every sound is synthesized in code.
- Every touch target is at least 64px on an iPad in landscape. Portrait politely asks you to rotate.
The garage. Build your ride from 15 bodies (dump truck to dragon to royal carriage), 8 wheel sets, 12 paints including rainbow, flank decals, and toggle extras like wings and a rocket booster. Locked parts show in full color with a price tag: collect stars, tap, own it. Upgrade the engine, shield, and star magnet at the workbench. Fix crash damage with the wrench. Wash off real mud with your finger in the wash bay. A magic dice button builds you a surprise.
The road. Three lanes, a gas pedal, a brake pedal. Swipe or use the arrows to steer into stars and away from barrels, rocks, TNT, tumbleweeds, and crabs. Ramps jump, puddles splash, capsules pop open with prizes, and the finish flag brings confetti, a star tally, a 1 to 3 star rating, and an S/A/B/C time medal.
Eight worlds, eighty levels. Construction, sunset, night, rain, snow, desert, beach, and space, each with its own scenery, weather, and hazards. Space has low gravity. The map is a winding road of level nodes; beating a world's last level unlocks the next and pays a trophy bonus. A free drive mode tours all eight worlds forever with no finish line and no timer. And beating all eighty unlocks the Victory Parade: a rainbow-road finale with fireworks, every buddy you've found cheering from the roadside, and a champion's jackpot at the trophy arch.
The album. Six buddy critters hide inside capsules and ride in the cab when found. Sticker badges mark firsts (first jump, first clean run, first S medal...). Every finish saves a polaroid of that exact build. All of it lives in a scrapbook.
| Touch (the real way) | Keyboard (desktop) | |
|---|---|---|
| Drive | hold the green pedal, or anywhere on the road | D, right arrow, or space |
| Brake | red pedal | A or left arrow |
| Steer | swipe up/down, or the side arrows | W/S or up/down arrows |
| Honk | tap your car |
- Profiles: the avatar button (top left of the garage) holds up to three kids, each with their own save. No typing, just faces.
- Save codes: the same panel shows a scan-to-open QR — point another device's camera
at it and the game opens with the save ready to import. Copy/paste buttons carry a
full save code, and opening
https://zacker3310.github.io/vroom/#save=<code>imports one directly. - Quiet mode: the speaker button drops every sound to car-friendly volume. It sticks.
- Offline: add it to the home screen from Safari and it runs with no connection.
- Progress lives in the browser's local storage on the device. Clearing Safari website data erases it, so export a save code first if it matters.
- One
index.html. No frameworks, no build step, no assets, no network calls. All art is inline SVG, all audio is Web Audio synthesis through a master compressor, all 80 levels come from a seeded generator so they are stable across plays. - The QR code is produced by a hand-rolled encoder (byte mode, ECC level L, versions 1 to 10 with multi-block Reed-Solomon interleaving over GF(256)) verified byte-exact against a real decoder.
tests/holds ten Playwright suites with 161 checks covering the economy, physics, worlds, album, profiles, save codes, and the wash. Seetests/README.mdto run them.- Built with Claude Code in an agentic build loop: design and content generated by
parallel subagents, every round audited by an adversarial reviewer with fix authority
before merge. The full audit trail is in
.buildloop/review-report.md.
Made for one particular kid. If it keeps yours busy on a road trip too, it did its job.