NO PREP

Street Rod meets Balatro. A side-scrolling drag racing game with roguelike progression — the kind of game that could’ve shipped on three floppy disks in 1996 and still felt dangerous.

You build a car and push your luck. The series gets meaner every round.

The vibe

Late 80s and early 90s. Chunky CRT monitors, dial-up modem sounds, classified-ad pages, rundown townhouses with a bare bulb in the garage. Web pages with hit counters and tiled backgrounds. Cars pulled from an era when “performance” meant something different on every continent.

Where it’s at

In active prototyping. The full game — parts, economy, drivers, the townhouse — is still on paper.

An early playable slice - a bare-bones quarter-mile tracer with one car, one track, and the core idea running (shift zones computed from the tune instead of authored, so re-gearing moved every one of them) - proved the concept before being retired while the design gets reworked. No tune screen, no parts, no ghost: just launch, shift, see your time.

The devlog covers the build as it happens.