About the game / an Aleksandar Perisic experiment

I built a Tesla Roadster game with AI coding

Thrust Trials is a free pixel-art stunt game you play in the browser. You fly a roadster that sticks to walls with suction fans and jumps on bursts of compressed air. I built it in about a day, with an AI coding assistant writing most of the code while I played, judged and steered.

Why a Roadster game

On October 15, 2026 the new Tesla Roadster was shown doing things a car is not supposed to do. It held itself to a curved ramp past vertical and hung there upside down. It hopped over a row of parked cars and rolled on the way across. It launched from zero to sixty so fast the timer looked broken. The car did all of this on cold-gas thrusters: nozzles that blow compressed air from a tank, the same idea spacecraft use to turn in orbit.

I could not stop thinking about what it would feel like to drive that. Not to watch it, to actually have your fingers on the nozzles and run out of air at the worst moment. So I tried to build it the same night.

These are the figures from the broadcast that the game is tuned around. They are on-stage claims, not independent measurements:

• 10 nozzles
• 600 L / ~250 kg of air
• ~4,700 kg of suction inverted
• 0.81 s event timer
• 0.67 s with rollout

Whatever ends up in the production car, that demo is a reminder of how far a car can still be pushed. Every number on that list sounds like science fiction until you watch it happen on a ramp.

From cold-gas thrusters to a game

The hard part was not drawing a car. It was turning a demo into rules a player can learn in a minute and still be surprised by an hour later. Each piece of the real system became a control:

Suction fans

Four ducted fans pull the car onto whatever surface it is touching, so it can drive up a wall and across a ceiling. In the game they also press the tires down harder, which is where the launch grip comes from. Leave them on when you try to jump and the car simply refuses to leave the ground. They heat up too, so you cannot lean on them forever.

Lift nozzles

Four nozzles on the underside push the car up, a nose and tail pair pitch it, and rear thrusters shove it forward. Rolling uses the ventral nozzles in pairs. That is ten nozzles, all fed from one tank.

One tank of air

Air is the whole game. Every burst costs some, the thrust weakens as the pressure drops, and the most common way to crash is to spend it all on a pretty flip and have nothing left to cushion the landing.

The five stages

1. 01Systems Check. A tutorial that brings every system online one at a time, then asks for a first hop.
2. 02Inversion Run. Drive up the curved ramp until you hang upside down, stop there, cut the fans, flip upright in the air and land in the zone. This loop is the shot everybody remembers.
3. 03Five-Car Kickflip. A powered hop over five parked vehicles with a full roll on the way over.
4. 040-60 Launch. Fans for grip, thrusters for the launch. Beat the event timer, then brake before the barrier.
5. 05Inspired Mode. A long free-practice pad with kickers, refill pads and the inversion ramp as the finale. Arcade rules, flips and rolls score, clean landings build a streak.

Stages 01 to 04 follow what the broadcast showed. Stage 05 is where I let myself make it a game.

How it was built with AI coding

I worked with Claude Code, an AI coding agent, the way you would work with a very fast teammate. I described what I wanted to feel, played the result, and said what was wrong. The agent wrote and rewrote the code, ran it, and checked its own work. My job was taste and direction: which stunt matters, when a landing feels unfair, what to cut.

• No engine. The whole game is one web page: three.js for the 3D scene and plain JavaScript for everything else.
• Real-ish physics. A fixed 120 Hz simulation where suction acts as a force against the surface, tire grip depends on load, and thrust falls with tank pressure.
• Pixel art from 3D. The scene renders into a tiny image, then a shader adds outlines, dithering and a 32-colour palette before scaling it up with hard pixels.
• Replays for free. Every input is recorded, so a replay re-simulates your run exactly and can show it from several cameras.
• Sound made live. Engine, fans, thrusters and music are all synthesised in the browser. There are no audio files.

An autopilot that plays every stage

The part I did not expect was testing. Every time the physics changed, something that used to be landable became a crash. So the game got its own autopilot. A headless browser opens the page, the autopilot flies all five stages with real key presses, and the run fails if the car crashes, scores an F or never reaches the results screen. A change only ships when the robot can still finish every stage. The same autopilot now flies a stunt reel for videos.

What surprised me

• Speed. Going from "what if" to a playable first stage took an evening, not weeks. The bottleneck moved from typing code to deciding what is fun.
• Feel is still a human job. The agent could make the car fly. Knowing that a landing was a few percent too harsh, or that a hint appeared one second too late, came from playing it again and again.
• Tests made it bold. With an autopilot checking every stage, big physics changes stopped being scary. That changed how ambitious the work could be.
• Small details carry it. The NEXT hint in the tutorial, the replay cameras and the sound of the fans spinning down did more for the game than any single big feature.

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