Creating a pseudo3d racing game is bringing vibe coding to its limits

Vibe coding is undoubtable an impressive new approach to generate software and products and when you are active on social media a lot, you sooner or later stumble upon some tech influencer trying to tell you its the holy grail while passing you their affiliate links for various such bespoken tools. It is a hype, a lot of people want to own easy and loads of money but we should keep realistically all about this.

I recently did a lot of vibe coding and for me its really fun to return to tech and programming after having written a single line of code since 10 years. But I also wanted to to advance think then build the 10.000 habit tracker, task manager or whatsoever. I decided to dig deeper into the topic of game development using vibe coding. About my first game I wrote here some time ago. My next game project should be a little more advanced in terms of technics: a pseudo3d racing game in the style of Outrun.

Pseudo3D what?

Peudeo3D is a projection technic from the late 80, begin 90s that has been developed back then to create 3D like views for first person view games like racing etc. The core is a logic that projects a 3D world into real world 2D screen coordinates. The math behind this is sort of advanced stuff, but there are good tutorials out there explaining everything:

Tutorial for building the basic render logic
Tutorial with working game example

Vibe coding a Pesudo3D racing game

The tutorials and sample code mentioned are really crucial for the vibe coding approach here, cause as of End 2025 NO AI model gets the pseudo3d projection correct. If you ask Claude to to a pseudo3d racing game it will come up with something like this. At first sight this looks OK as it can create the projection, we can move the car around, it feels smooth etc. It took about 10 iteration to get to this version – so really fast. BUT: Claude was not able to create the correct car physics not following stupidly the road pattern. It was simply not able to get this right.

I tried the same example with various currently available flagship models, but none of them (End 2025) was able to get it done. In fact the Claude solution was the best we can get.

So how to get further? Actually quite simple: You just provide a working example code to the AI and ask to implement the logic from there into your code base. This works better, but also needs manual refinement. The programming language doesn’t matter which is really great. Also I used a python example to get my JavaScript game ahead. Unfortunately the AI never understands the params you need to balance to get a actual usable driving physics out of it, so I ended up tweaking a lot manually. Which has the side effect, you somehow begin to understand the math behind everything.

My Outrun clone: Neon Drift

As mentioned before my game should be a Outrun clone with procedural created roads, different surface and background types and a arcade style car physics. I created most of the game graphics using GPT-image-1 and Google’s nano banana. The music was created using Suno and the sound effect I got from the open platform https://pixabay.com. In total I must have invested around 100h to get the version you can play now. It has besides the procedural random track also 11 further pre-defined track you can race. Enjoy!