Road Dodge

The left half of the road belongs to somebody else

You start in the right-hand lane of a two-lane road with an empty horizon. Lanes are counted from the right shoulder outward, the way a driver counts them, and everything to the left of the centre line is traffic doing the same speed in the opposite direction. It arrives at about a hundred and forty kilometres an hour relative to you.

You are allowed to cross, and half the time it is the correct move. Roadworks never tell you where the next gap is, so you commit to the wrong side knowing roughly how long you can stay, and you are usually wrong by a little.

Speed is a currency you pay for in fuel

The score is the metres you have covered plus bonuses. Distance only accrues while you are moving, so there is no way to bank progress by driving carefully.

The throttle is not free. Fuel burns at your speed multiplied by a small number that itself contains your speed, which is the tidiest way of saying the cost per metre climbs the faster you go. A tank is worth about fifteen hundred metres at the 122 km/h the car settles into on its own, and about twelve hundred at 180. A jerry can returns twenty-eight units and twenty-five points, and cans turn up a little under half a kilometre apart, so collecting every one is almost exactly break-even.

What actually ends a clean run

Almost every long run dies in one of three places. The first is a bad overtake: you pull out to pass a slow car and find the gap belongs to a truck, because a truck is twelve pixels wider and you judged it by the car in front. The second is the roadworks, where committing to the oncoming side costs you the ability to swerve back right. The third is the tank, usually because the last can spawned in a lane you decided not to visit.

There is a fourth, quieter one. Overtaking traffic is only a few metres a second slower than you, so braking hard to buy thinking time hands the overtake back to them. Braking is a real choice with a real cost, not a pause button.

The road changes shape while you are doing two hundred

Every few hundred metres something happens and announces itself across the top of the screen. A third lane opens on the inside, then a fourth. The road narrows again. A stretch of hatching closes the lane you were using. Oncoming traffic thickens. Closures never happen on a two-lane road and the extra lane always appears on the inside, so the lane you are in keeps its identity while the tarmac around it moves. It still moves under you, and being shoved sideways by a road that has decided to be narrower is a real way to meet somebody.

Questions people ask after their first crash

Why does one clipped wing mirror end the whole run?

Because there are no lives to spend. Road Dodge is a single-car survival run and the headline number is the distance you covered, so a car that survives a scrape and keeps rolling would make that number a lie. One contact with another vehicle, a roadworks barrier or the road edge closure ends the run and freezes the total. The consequence is that the game is about leaving room rather than about absorbing hits, which is why the collision box is slightly smaller than the car you can see.

What counts as a near miss?

Same-direction traffic only. When a car you are overtaking draws level with you and its centre passes within about twenty-six pixels of yours, the game pays twelve points and flashes the words across the road. Oncoming cars never pay, because a close pass on the wrong side of the centre line is not a skill, it is a mistake you have not finished making yet. Near misses are the only bonus in the game that is completely under your control, which is why they are worth so little per one.

Is it safer to sit in the right-hand lane and let everything go past?

Safer, and worth less, though not by as much as you would guess. Distance is the score and distance accrues at whatever speed you are doing, so the right-hand lane at cruise speed still pays out. What it costs you is the events. When roadworks close your lane you are pushed left into oncoming traffic at the exact moment you have the least room, and the traffic in your own lane is the slow traffic you have chosen not to overtake, which means you meet all of it.

How far do I have to get before the run stops being gentle?

The first four hundred metres are two lanes with nothing coming the other way, and the only thing that can hurt you is a car you are overtaking. Oncoming traffic starts after that, and density keeps climbing until roughly the two thousand metre mark and then holds. The cruise speed never stops rising, though, which is the part that actually ends runs. Most of them die somewhere between one and three kilometres, and the ones that go further are the ones that spent fuel without hesitating.

Why this one is drawn as a diagram

The other driving game on this site is a proper three-dimensional thing with a horizon and a bonnet, and I did not want two versions of the same view. So this one has no perspective at all, and a car is the same size wherever it is, which sounds like a limitation until you notice it makes every gap measurable at a glance. I picked lane width first and let every other number fall out of it, because the only thing this game has to get right is whether you fit.