This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam
What I Built
Road Trip With Your Buddy is a trivia driving game. Your car cruises automatically down an endless road, and every couple of minutes a question pops up that you have to type the answer to before your time runs out. Get it wrong, and you lose a heart. Lose all 5 hearts, and the road fades to grayscale with a big red GAME OVER.
The questions pull from a shuffled pool covering Juneteenth, civil rights and women's suffrage history, Alan Turing and computing pioneers, and World Cup soccer, tying directly into this jam's themes of Pride month, Juneteenth, and the World Cup mentioned in the challenge prompt. The goal was to make learning a bit of history feel like an arcade game instead of a quiz.
🔗 Play it live: https://road-buddy.netlify.app
Video Demo
Code
This is a Next.js project bootstrapped with create-next-app.
Getting Started
First, run the development server:
npm run dev
# or
yarn dev
# or
pnpm dev
# or
bun dev
Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.
You can start editing the page by modifying app/page.js. The page auto-updates as you edit the file.
This project uses next/font to automatically optimize and load Geist, a new font family for Vercel.
Learn More
To learn more about Next.js, take a look at the following resources:
- Next.js Documentation - learn about Next.js features and API.
- Learn Next.js - an interactive Next.js tutorial.
You can check out the Next.js GitHub repository - your feedback and contributions are welcome!
Deploy on Vercel
The easiest way to deploy your Next.js app is to use the Vercel Platform from the creators of Next.js.
Check out our Next.js deployment documentation for more…
How I Built It
The game is built with Next.js (JavaScript, no TypeScript) and Tailwind CSS. The road and car are layered PNGs, with a CSS keyframe animation scrolling the road background to simulate forward motion without any actual physics engine.
Game state (hearts, score, current question) lives in React state, with hearts and score persisted to localStorage so progress survives a page refresh. Questions are generated from small, accurate datasets combined with reusable templates rather than hardcoded one by one. For example, a single list of World Cup years, hosts, and winners generates multiple question types (host, winner, title count) instead of needing a separate handwritten question for each fact, the same approach was used for civil rights and computing history figures.
A custom hook-based timer schedules the next question only after the current one is answered, avoiding the classic bug where a slow setInterval causes questions to stack up back to back.
Prize Category
Submitting for Best Ode to Alan Turing. Turing trivia (the Turing Test, Enigma, the Turing machine, and his role in founding computer science) is built directly into the question pool the player encounters while driving, so honoring his legacy is part of the core gameplay loop rather than a side mention.
Team:
Built by @rae_codes and @ifeanyichima.
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