Delivery Dash

Sendcloud wanted a game for their trade show booth: something competitive and easy to pick up, where two visitors could face off at the stand and walk away having had fun. The game tied into a top-5 daily leaderboard, giving people a reason to come back and try to beat their score over the course of the event.

The game puts two players on a shared 4x4 street grid, each driving a Sendcloud delivery truck toward the front. Position is everything: the front row earns about ten times more points per second than the back, so staying ahead matters and falling behind is punishing. Rounds last 90 seconds, then a winner screen shows the result and the daily top-5 leaderboard. Scores are stored per day in the browser with no backend, so event staff can reset them each morning with a URL parameter.

Movement is grid-based. Each truck lives inside a named cell on the grid and smoothly slides to the next one when a key is pressed. Because a truck's position is always relative to its current cell, moving it requires pulling the world position of the target cell and converting it into local coordinates before the slide starts. Once it lands, the truck reparents into the new cell, which also doubles as collision detection: a cell marked as occupied simply blocks the move.

The four powerups are the main source of chaos. Picking one up triggers a slot-machine animation that shuffles through the options before landing on a result. Boost moves you forward one row. Oil drops a slick at your position that pushes the opponent back. Net fires a projectile that pins them in reverse for over a second. Change swaps both trucks' grid positions instantly, which is devastating when you're sitting in last place. Each powerup needed a different kind of projectile or collision behavior, so I built them as separate systems that fire off on contact using screen-space overlap checks running every frame.

The street itself scrolls upward at an accelerating pace, with obstacles and powerup pickups placed procedurally on each new section. Speed ramps from a crawl to 500 units per second over the 30-second round, which adds pressure without feeling unfair at the start. Both players can also plug in a gamepad if one is available, polled directly through the browser's Gamepad API.

A deployed two-player arcade installation for Sendcloud's trade show booth: a 90-second delivery truck race on a shared screen with keyboard or gamepad controls, four powerups, procedural obstacles, and a daily top-5 leaderboard. Built solo.

The booth pulled a crowd. Both players and spectators got into it, which is exactly what you need from a game running at a live event stand. For me it was an interesting technical challenge: building a grid-movement system where each truck is a child of its current cell keeps collision clean, but moving a truck requires some careful coordinate math while it is mid-slide between parents.