Cut Corners
Small animals. No manners. Cups to win, and tracks that do not stay in the woods.
What it is
A fox, a squirrel, a raccoon and five others (a monkey, a bird, a bear, a bunny and a hedgehog) in karts built out of crates and rope.
The tracks wander a long way from the forest they start in: a sawmill, a canyon, a crystal cavern, a foundry, a moonbase. Some of them are races around somebody's back garden, past the paddling pool and under the washing line.
You drift the corners, you pick up what the track leaves lying around, and you throw it at whoever is in front. If you have played a kart racer you already know how this one works, which is the point.
Cups, and a ladder
The tracks are grouped into cups: Sawmill, Timber, Wonder, Crosswind, Wild, Jungle, and a Backyard Bash that races round a paddling pool. Win them across four speed classes: Cub, Trail, Summit and Apex.
The faster classes are visible before you can enter them, so you can see what you are climbing toward rather than having it appear out of nowhere.
The garage
Racers, karts and gliders to mix. The parts you fit change how the kart handles rather than only how it looks, and they add up to a rating you can see, so a build is something you can compare, not just a look you picked.
Several people can keep separate profiles on the same device, each with their own ratings and progress.
The assist options are the reason it is here
Always Forward takes the accelerator away entirely: you only steer left and right. Easy Steering widens the margins for a small pair of hands.
With both on, a five-year-old finishes a race. With both off, the drift matters and the corners are tight. That range is deliberate: this is meant to work in a room where you do not get to choose who picks it up.
One tap to a race
The first button on the title screen is Quick Race, and it puts you on a track without asking you anything. After that it changes to repeat whatever you last set up, so the second race is one tap too.
Everything else is there when you want it (pick a racer, a kart, a glider, a speed and a track), but none of it is in the way.
Three ways to play
Race a cup and watch the tournament standings, run a Time Trial against your own previous best, or take Free Drive and learn a track with nobody else on it.
How hard the field races and how far back the camera sits are both yours to set, and the gentlest setting says what it is for: learn the track, no pressure.
How to play
- SteerDrag
- DriftHold while turning
On a desktop, the arrow keys or WASD steer, space and shift handle the accelerator and the drift, and Escape pauses.
What isn't settled yet
The racing works, the assists do what they claim, the cup ladder gives it somewhere to go, and Quick Race means none of that is in the way of a first race. What has not been checked is the thing no amount of building settles: whether someone who has never seen it picks it up, races twice, and wants a third.
Build Log
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Build 347
A desktop player reported driving through item boxes and getting nothing while the AI collected plenty. Pickup was fine. Every touch control is hidden on desktop and nothing named the keyboard bindings, so the player picked up one item, could not discover how to use it, and `tryPickupItem` opens by returning early if an item is already held, so every box after the first silently did nothing. One missing line of text presenting as a broken mechanic. A key legend now appears on non-touch devices only.
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Build 338
Dropped parts only ever auto-fitted into an empty slot, guarded by a deliberate note that a slot the player had filled should never be overwritten behind their back. That reasoning had quietly expired: a separate guard in the loot module enforces that every affix is positive, so with no cursed parts and a single kart rating the question "should I fit this?" always reduced to "is the number bigger?", which is arithmetic, not a decision. Strict upgrades now fit themselves and the drop card names the gain. The half of the old rule that still held was kept: a swap carries the outgoing part's stats away with it, so anything mixed stays with the player.
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Build 328
Item boxes were laid four to a row at fixed fractions of the road, so the same four stretched across whatever width they were on: about 4.3 apart on the default road and 5.9 on the widest, which is where a player notices the row looking thin. The count now grows with the road, four to six, and the fractions are generated so the outermost box still lands where it always did.
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Build 299
Every racer in the game had blank white eyes. The eye parts were stacked back-to-front (sclera at z -0.16 in front of the iris, pupil and catchlight behind it), so an opaque white sphere hid all three. The pupil sizing work done around build 143 had been correct the whole time and simply never visible. It is the same wrong assumption about which way a character faces that put the inner ears on the back of the head at build 241, four lines away in the same builder.
Earlier builds (5)
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Build 294
Jump ramps were banked using the camber at the start line rather than their own position, tilting one edge of the ramp down into the road on any banked section. The cause was a defensive-looking line: `bankSlopeAt(frame.s !== undefined ? frame.s : 0)`. The frame object never had an `s` property, so the fallback fired on every ramp, on every track.
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Build 291
Four short dark stubs sat at the corners of every kart's roll cage, attached to nothing. The cage tapers inward (rails at `halfW * TAPER`, TAPER being 0.70), but the corner gussets had been left at the full `halfW` of the boxy cage they were designed for. They were reported three times before anyone found them, because a per-part scan cannot see inside a merged mesh and the kart merges its statics.
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Build 241
The pale inner surface of every ear pointed backwards. Characters face +z (the muzzle runs out to +0.19), so the inner ears sat on the back of the head, plainly visible from the seat behind them. Portraits render from in front, the one angle that could never show it.
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Build 231
The four Rumble arenas are tracks, not a mode of their own: `roadHalfWidth` 26 to 34, where every racing track sits between 9 and 16. Generated loops had built broken geometry for weeks. The cause was scale, not shape: at a point spacing near 150, matching the hand-drawn tracks, they build clean.
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Build 229
Tapping QUICK RACE built the whole track before the browser could paint, so the button sat dead for 488ms, twelve milliseconds off the threshold Google calls poor. It now acknowledges the tap, yields two frames, then builds. The work takes just as long; the difference is that something happens.
Credits and licences
Built on three.js, used under the MIT licence with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence. Cover drawn from the game’s own track, kart and racer code.
Cut Corners is original work by Launchway Games.