Derby Prototype

Derby Prototype is written in plain JavaScript against the HTML canvas 2D API — no game engine, no physics library, no external dependencies of any kind. Every car is a rotated rectangle tracked by position, heading, and speed; steering and acceleration are applied each frame, and friction slows every car down when the throttle isn't held.

Collisions are resolved with simple circle-overlap checks between cars. When the player's car and an opponent overlap, the relative speed of the impact decides the outcome: a fast, head-on hit pushes the opponent off its course, scores points, and briefly slows both cars; a slow graze barely nudges either one. Opponents themselves drift around the arena on a simple wandering pattern, bouncing off the boundary walls, rather than chasing the player.

It's a small, deliberately simplified demo — a tribute to the idea behind the original 2013 tech demo (that destructible-feeling car contact could be fun on its own, with no track or lap requirement) rather than an attempt to reproduce Wreckfest's actual deformation engine, which this archive has no access to.

The arena itself is intentionally small and enclosed rather than an open track, mostly so the wall boundaries can double as extra obstacles — bouncing an opponent into the rust-lined perimeter counts the same as a straight collision. The three opponents don't hunt the player; they wander on their own loose paths, so the scoring depends entirely on how the player chooses to time and angle an approach rather than on scripted difficulty.

Most of this site is a written and illustrated record — the year-by-year development timeline, the studio profile, the dev-diary citations. A playable demo is a different kind of record: it lets a visitor experience, in a very small way, the same core idea that made the original tech demo worth covering in gaming press back in 2013 — that car-to-car contact itself, not lap times, was the interesting part of the design.

Keeping Derby Prototype dependency-free was a deliberate choice as well. A page that needs no game engine, no asset pipeline, and no network request beyond the page itself loads quickly and keeps working long after any given JavaScript framework's version has moved on — which fits an archive meant to still be readable years from now, not just at launch.