Vector Race

The racing game people play on squared paper, built on SDL2. Your car has a velocity: every turn it moves by that velocity, and before it moves you may adjust each component by one cell — no more. The straight line it sweeps has to stay on the road. That is the whole game, and it is all about carrying speed into a corner you can still get out of.

Clip a wall and the car stops on the last piece of road it reached, loses all of its speed AND its next turn, and leaves a scorch mark in your colour. That last part matters: without it the barrier is just a free handbrake. Zero crashes is a perfect run, and the game says so.

Three ways to play:

• Time Trial — one car, ranked on fewest moves, then fewest crashes, then the clock. Your best run is saved per circuit and replayed as a ghost line to race against.
• 2 Players — hotseat, alternating turns. Cars block each other, but only where it counts: you may sweep past the square your opponent is sitting on and collide only if you would come to rest on it.
• vs CPU — the same, against a computer driver at Easy, Medium or Hard. It plays your nine moves, searched a few turns deep, steering by a distance field measured through the corridor — so it brakes for corners instead of aiming at the apex wall.

Five circuits across five map themes — mown grass, an island in a turquoise sea, red desert, snow over a frozen lake, and basalt with lava running through it — drawn as solid terrain with kerbed roads and scattered scenery.

There is an in-game circuit designer too: shape the racing line by dragging control points and the road follows at the width you choose, with a brush for touch-ups and forty levels of undo. It checks as you draw and will not hand the game a circuit it cannot race.

Plays entirely with the mouse or entirely with the keyboard. No image, font or audio assets ship — every shape and every sound is generated at runtime.