chemickypes/yellow-racer

Yellow Racer is a pseudo 3D racing game, styled after the classic arcade game Pole Position, built to run on a specific piece of cheap hardware: the ESP32-2432S028R board, nicknamed the Cheap Yellow Display, which has a 2.8 inch touchscreen built right onto the board. It is written in C++ using the Arduino framework and built with PlatformIO. The game renders curving roads and hills using a projected segment technique, a classic trick for faking 3D graphics on limited hardware, inspired by an older javascript racing game tutorial. Because the board has no extra memory chip, the game draws to an 8 bit color buffer in RAM to avoid flickering, at roughly 25 frames per second. Visually it includes red and white rumble strips along the road edges, a dashed center line, and a Mount Fuji silhouette in the background. Gameplay is entirely touch controlled. On the menu screen the player taps one of three tracks, ranked easy, medium, and hard. During a race the car accelerates on its own, and tapping the left or right half of the screen steers in that direction, with cornering force pushing the car outward if the player does not counter steer. Driving off the marked road onto the grass slows the car down. Each race is a three lap time attack, and the final score is the remaining time multiplied by 100. Setting it up requires the physical CYD board and PlatformIO installed locally. Building and flashing is done with two command line steps, connecting to the board over USB. The project also includes small Python helper scripts for capturing screenshots and a gameplay GIF directly from the running firmware over the serial connection. The project's own notes describe basic hardware setup and game logic as complete, with an optional future milestone covering faster graphics output, better touch calibration, and sound. It is released under the MIT license, and it credits several open source libraries it depends on for the display and touchscreen drivers.