Crash Derby Arena.
A PS2 game I half-remembered and couldn't stop thinking about. Then I realised I could just make it.
The memory was specific: a demolition derby in a dirt bowl, four people on one sofa, every hit an event. I couldn’t fully remember the game, but I could remember exactly how it felt — and that feeling is what the couch has been missing ever since multiplayer moved online. So this became my first step into game development: not a tutorial project, but the game I actually wanted to play with my friends. Sixteen chunky 90s banger cars drop into a county-fair dirt bowl at dusk; you ram, dodge, and boost until you’re the last car rolling.
The design rule is that the hit is the game. Everything else serves the moment two cars meet: a custom arcade car controller on rigid-body physics — deliberately not the engine’s stock vehicle — running a sixty-hertz tick, with per-region crumple states, parts that tear off as physics debris, smoke, sparks, engine fire near death, and named Burnout-style takedowns stamped across the screen in comic-book bursts. Rounds are tuned short and savage — ninety seconds to two minutes — and wrecked cars stay on the field as burnt husks, so the bowl gets more dangerous as the round closes in. When only two remain, the floodlights drop for a final duel. And if a round dawdles, a monster truck called THE CLOSER smashes through the gate to end it.
The opponents have personalities rather than difficulty settings — the Hunter chases the leader, the Opportunist rams whoever’s mid-fight, the Coward hides until the endgame, the Berserker just sends it — and they telegraph their hits so getting wrecked feels fair. Around the core sit the party layers: three weight classes plus unlockable joke vehicles (an ice-cream van, a bumper car, a mini tractor), mutators like bouncy walls and one-hit wrecks, a play-money fair economy with kid-safe derby-night betting on bot matches, and a career book with persistent named rivals. The whole thing wears a county-fair UI kit called THE MIDWAY.
It went from first commit to a playable, playtested build in five days — 247 commits, fifty specs, roughly thirty thousand lines of GDScript, ten logged playtests on real hardware — built through the same orchestrated framework as everything else this month. Couch multiplayer for the sofa it was designed around is the next milestone; the split-screen rig is already in the code. It is, objectively, very fun to hit things.
