What it is
Paardenrace ("horse race") is a vibe-coded 3D browser
game: a kart racer, but with horses. It takes its cues from
Mario Kart and the old DOS classic Wacky Wheels:
three laps around a looping track, a pack of computer riders with names like
Hagelslag, Pepernoot, Drop and Karamel, and a lot of silly items to mess with each
other.
You ride solo, or two players share one keyboard in split-screen,
each with their own view, place, lap timer and item slots, and a shared mini-map in
the middle. It also runs on phones and tablets with touch controls.
Bunnies, hedgehogs and rain clouds
Instead of shells and bananas you pick up bunnies,
hedgehogs and rain clouds to throw forward or back
at your rivals. There are hurdles and hedges across the track that you have to jump
(miss one and you get an "OOF!"), a grandstand full of cheering spectators, a
windmill, hay bales and a few different tracks and times of day, from green meadow
to sunset desert.
Sonnet vs Opus
I built it twice from the same idea to compare models: one version with
Claude Sonnet 5.5 and one with Claude Opus 5.5.
Both turned out impressive for what is essentially a few evenings of prompting, but
all in all the Opus 5.5 version was the better game: it felt more
polished, more complete and more fun to play. That is the version linked below and
shown in the screenshots.
How it's made
Plain JavaScript on top of Three.js, no game engine, no build
step. The horses, riders, track and scenery are all low-poly geometry built in code,
with music and sound effects, a menu to pick riders and tracks, and on-screen
controls for touch devices.