TinyTrack

The pitch

Racing games assume you’ll turn your phone sideways and give them both hands. TinyTrack doesn’t. It’s real 3D drift racing, in portrait, played with one thumb — the format phones are actually held in, on the bus, in the queue, in bed.

Why I’m making it

Time-trial racing is the purest score attack there is: no rubber-banding, no opponents, just you, the racing line and a ghost that’s 0.3 seconds faster. I’ve wanted a version of that feeling that fits in a vertical screen and a spare minute. Portrait 3D racing is a genuinely hard layout problem — the track has to read clearly in a narrow view — and that difficulty is exactly what makes it interesting to build.

How I’m building it

TinyTrack is web-first: Three.js through React Three Fiber for rendering, Rapier for the car’s rigid-body physics, Zustand for game state, all in TypeScript. Building in the browser keeps iteration instant — tweak the drift grip, hot-reload, feel the difference in seconds — and Capacitor ships the same build to iOS.

The cars and tracks come out of a custom Blender pipeline: modelled low-poly, exported with collision meshes and racing-line metadata baked in, so a new track goes from Blender to playable without touching game code. The drift model is deliberately arcade — grip you can break loose predictably, counter-steer that always answers — because the game lives or dies on whether a lap feels good at second attempt number forty.

Follow the build in the devlog.