Trike
A stunt racer about a three-wheeled machine that flips end over end, pogos off its own front wheel and rides either way round, while its pilot sits level in a gimballed pod at the center of the chaos. Race six tracks against five rivals, or take two minutes in a warehouse skate park and chase a score.
Clips
The pod stays level
A back flip at quarter speed, seen from a camera fixed beside the kicker. Throttle and a lean lift the single front wheel. The trike hangs at its balance point, then tips past the rear axle on its own and comes right over. The rear pair folds under the frame so both wheels touch down together, and the trike lands reversed, paired wheels leading. Through all of it the pilot barely moves: the pod turns on a gimbal against the frame, leaning only a little into the trick.
A trick run
Trick mode is two minutes alone in the warehouse. Here: the countdown, a wheelie held into a back flip, then straight up the north wall for a lip air. Each trick joins an open combo. When the trike has been on the ground and quiet for two seconds, the combo banks as the sum of its tricks times their number.
Lights out on The Void
A race start among crystal islands in a starfield. Six trikes share the grid, and each rival drives its own line with its own lookahead and nerve. Everything on screen around the track is drawn by script: position, lap and time, the live standings with gaps, the minimap and the speed dial.
Title and track select
The title screen, then the track carousel, played by the game's own menu demo. Each card is an entity in the menu scene, so adding a track is one block of text and one generated thumbnail. The cards show length, laps, your best and difficulty, and the Skate Park card shows its clock instead.
Screenshots
About
Trike is a stunt racer in the spirit of Uniracers, built around one invented vehicle. The trike has a single front wheel on a hydraulic piston and a pair of wheels behind. The piston is strong enough to lift the whole machine, so the trike can stand on its tail, flip end over end, pogo off its front wheel, and carry on either way round.
In the middle of the frame sits a glass pod with a pilot in it. The pod hangs on a gimbal, so while the frame tumbles, the pilot stays level and keeps looking ahead. That contrast, a machine in chaos around a calm person, is the idea the game is built on.
The cover is one back flip, photographed five times. A camera fixed beside the kicker recorded the flip, and the five moments are laid over the empty room, the oldest faintest, in the manner of Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs. The frame goes over; the pilot doesn’t.
Two Ways to Play
- Race. Three laps against five rivals, each with their own livery and driving personality. There are six tracks: Oval Plus, Mountain Switchback and its reverse, The Crucible (a volcanic caldera with a launch ramp and a spiral climb), The Void (crystal islands in a starfield), and The Crossroads, where the road forks around a shortcut. Drift through corners for a boost, and trick off the jumps along the way.
- Trick mode. Two minutes alone in an indoor skate park: a warehouse with skylights and hanging lamps, ringed by quarter-pipes, with two half-pipes, a kicker, a gap jump and fun boxes. When the clock runs out, an open combo still gets a moment to land and bank. Your best score is kept.
The Tricks
- Flips come from balance, not animation. The trike always rests on its lowest wheel and pivots around that axle. Throttle and a lean lift the leading end. Hold it near the balance point and it hovers in a wheelie. Push past the point where the weight crosses the axle, and the trike tips over on its own. The same works the other way, with the brake, for a stoppie and a front flip.
- Pogo. Hold the button to compress the hydraulic piston, and release it to launch. A longer charge goes higher.
- Spins. Steering in the air turns the trike. On touchdown the spin rounds to the nearest half turn, so a clean 180 lands rolling backward. Land too far off and it’s a bail, which costs speed and the open combo.
- Stances. As in skateboarding, the trike can run standard, fakie (backward), switch (flipped, paired wheels leading) or nollie. Ride up a wall without throttle and you come back down fakie. The controls and the camera follow the direction of travel, so the same hands do the same thing whichever way round you are.
- Half-pipes. On a pipe the trike follows the curve exactly, flies straight up off the coping for a lip air, and drops back onto the wall.
- Scoring. Every trick and its points live in one data file. Tricks chain into combos in the style of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and repeating a trick inside one combo halves its value each time.
How It’s Built
- Trike runs on Flint, my own engine, which is included in the project. Scenes, tracks and the trick dictionary are plain text files, and all gameplay is script.
- The vehicle is hand-built physics. Driving, the balance-point flips, ramps, airtime and the half-pipe are all script. The physics engine only joins in for three joints: the fold of the rear arm, the piston, and the pod’s gimbal.
- Steering is a bicycle model. The trike turns at a rate set by its speed, its wheelbase and the steering angle, limited by grip.
- The pilot drives. The pilot’s hands hold the yoke through two-bone IK, and the body leans into turns.
- The HUD and menus follow a written style bible: one tangerine accent, Barlow Condensed with tabular figures so numbers don’t jitter, and ink slabs with an accent edge. Everything is drawn by script.
- Tracks are splines, with the road and walls swept along them. Each has its own sky and color grade, and The Crossroads branches and rejoins.
- The park is generated. A Python tool builds every pipe, wall, lamp and beam of the warehouse as closed solids with matching collision.
Everything above the text was captured from the game itself, through a capture mode added to Flint for this page. The game advances exactly one frame of time per frame, however long that frame takes to draw and save, so the footage is smooth and every run plays out the same way. In the race shots, the rivals’ driving brain steers the player’s trike, which still counts as the player. In the park, the tricks are timed key presses. The slow-motion flip was stepped at 120 frames a second and plays back at 30.
The last screenshot is the first trike, in February 2026.
Technical Details
- Engine: Flint (Rust, wgpu), as a git subtree
- Gameplay: Rhai scripts
- The trike: race and trick controllers, AI drivers, chase camera, kart visuals
- The game: race and trick session managers, the HUD, menus
- Physics: Script-driven vehicle dynamics, plus Rapier joints for the fold, piston and pod gimbal
- Content: TOML scenes, prefabs and components, spline tracks, and a data-driven trick dictionary
- Tools: Python generators for the skate park, half-pipes, terrain, skies, logo, UI atlas and track thumbnails
- Platforms: Windows, with an Android build target