Tight Fit

A 3D parking game about threading a vehicle through spaces that look too small for it. Fourteen levels, six vehicles, no lap times and no "you were 4 cm off centre" scoring — a level is passed when the vehicle is inside the bay, stopped, and you say you are done with it.

What is scored is direction changes: every time you swap between forward and reverse. Parking anything is easy given unlimited shunts, so the shunts are the game. There is no par and no published best — the only number to beat is your own on that level, and it sits next to your current one. Crashes are counted per attempt too, however gentle: a crash is the moment you touch something, so grinding along a wall is one crash, and letting go before you hit it again is what makes it two. Folding a trailer as far as the hitch goes is a crash on the same terms — the rig stops dead against the fold, and unwinding and refolding it is a second one.

Nothing tops 2.9 m/s. Holding a steady creep is not the challenge, so the vehicles do it for you — the throttle is analog, but first gear is all there is.

Play it

• v3 — the current build: v2's fourteen levels with the handling opened up — two steering modes, two throttle modes, and four multipliers to tune them at play time (commit cbe01a6). The root URL serves the newest version, which is v3 today.
• v2: fourteen levels, six vehicles, scored on direction changes, one fixed way to steer and one fixed way to accelerate (commit 13de828).
• v1 — the first version: the original ten levels and two vehicles, scored on time and bumps, before direction changes became the score. Kept as it was (commit e59328a).

All three are static builds of this repo on the gh-pages branch. v2 and v3 score in the same unit and share a save key, so a best set in one shows up in the other; v1 scored in a different unit and keeps its own key.

The rules this game is held to — what is scored, what is never scored, what a level has to prove before it ships — are in DESIGN.md. Read that before changing how a level or the scoring works.

pnpm install
pnpm dev        # http://127.0.0.1:5183
pnpm build      # static bundle in dist/

Controls

Built for a controller — analog steering and an analog throttle are what a game about the last half-metre wants. Keyboard and mouse work too, and the HUD legend follows whichever you touched last. Menus, level select and the pause card are all pad-navigable.

Pad	Keyboard
RT / LT	W / S	throttle, reverse (also brakes when moving the other way)
left stick	A / D	steer (works at a standstill, like power steering)
LB	Shift	crawl — caps the speed at ~1 m/s for the tight bits
A	Space	brake
right stick	Q / E, drag	look around the body
D-pad ↑↓	scroll	zoom
RS click	Z	recentre the view where the level handed it to you
RB	C	view: chase → inside → overhead
X	Backspace	hold to rewind
B	Enter	finish the level — only offered once you are in the bay and stopped
Y	R	restart level
LS click	M	mute
Menu	Esc	pause

Handling is settable, from the level select or the pause card.

Steering — Direct is the default: where you hold the stick is where the front wheels point, and letting go straightens them. Rate is the truck-sim handling: how far you push the stick is how fast the wheels turn, and letting go leaves the lock where it is, so coming back to straight is something you have to do.

Throttle — Speed is the default: the trigger is the speedometer, half pressed is half speed, and the vehicle comes down about as fast as the trigger itself springs back. It reads the trigger's own return curve, so it is connected without being a switch. This game is about finding the line, not about holding a speed along it, which is why this is the default rather than the option. Accelerator is the older feel: the trigger builds speed and letting go coasts down.

Four multipliers tune the feel: steering speed (Rate only — how far the wheels turn is the vehicle's own lock, not a preference), top speed, acceleration, and slow-down, which is how quickly it comes to rest when you let go. At 4x it stops in a third of a second against 1.35 at 1x. Crawl ignores the top-speed multiplier, because it exists to be a fixed slow speed, and the brake button ignores slow-down, because a brake is a brake.

Settings change the vehicle's timing, never its geometry. The set of paths a vehicle can drive is fixed by its lock, its wheelbase and its shape, and none of those is settable — drive the same steering profile at 1 m/s and at 6 and the path through the world is the same to fifteen decimal places, trailer included. So every level is finishable under any combination, and a record means the same thing in all of them.

A pad whose triggers report no analog value drives from the left stick instead, with full lock still reachable — a fallback that could not turn at full lock could not finish several of the levels.

The camera does what you told it and nothing else. It does not swing round when you reverse, pull itself in past walls, or trade distance for height on your behalf. Three views: chase, which shows the whole vehicle from outside; inside, which is the driver's seat; and overhead, which is what the collision model sees — collision is 2D, so the overhead view is the physics.

The inside view is built around the complaint that most driving games get it wrong: you sit behind the glass and cannot see your own bonnet, which is the one thing a real driver is always looking over. Here you can. A bus and a cab-over have no bonnet, so they get the thing that does its job instead — a dash whose front edge is a known distance from the nose. All three mirrors are there too, aimed exactly where the real glass points, but drawn at the sides and top of the screen rather than out at the corners of the windscreen, so reading one never means turning the view. The mirrors stick out and they collide: they get their own thin rectangle in the vehicle's footprint, so clipping one on a pillar costs you a crash exactly as a bumper would. Angles are held relative to the driven body, so a jackknifed trailer never drags your viewpoint with it, and a view you chose stays on the same corner of the vehicle as it turns. If a wall is in the way, it is in the way; the overhead view is one button away.

Reverse and a camera comes up, in every view, showing the ground behind the bumper with two rails on it — the path the vehicle would actually take at the steering angle you are holding, one metre of it, red then amber then green. They are drawn by the same integrator the physics uses, they exist only inside that panel, and they go away the moment you stop reversing.

The bar across the bottom is a parking sensor: the distance to the nearest thing in any direction, beeping faster as it closes. It is switched off in the inside view, bar and beeps together — from the driver's seat you get the mirrors, the camera and your eyes, which is what a real driver has. Articulated vehicles get a second gauge showing the angle at the hitch, which is the only honest warning you get before it folds. Beside them is a steering wheel that mirrors your stick — in Rate mode the lock stays where you leave it, and from the inside view the front tyres are out of sight in both modes, so where the wheel is pointing is a thing you otherwise cannot know. Those are the only three gauges, because they are the only things the view cannot tell you — there is no speedometer and no gear indicator, and nothing on screen is there to help you find the bay on your first attempt.

Hold rewind and the run plays backwards. No budget, no cooldown. It winds back the crashes and the direction changes with it, because the score is recorded step by step alongside the vehicle's position rather than tallied beside it — so a rewind past a crash also puts you back before the crash, and you have to drive that stretch again. What it removes is the half minute of driving back to the interesting part, which was never the difficulty.

The tyres leave marks, and they stay for the level. Faint, but enough to see afterwards whether the swing into the bay was one arc or three corrections, and how much wider the front wheels ran than the rear ones — the one thing you cannot see from the driver's seat while you are doing it. They are laid by distance rather than by time, so sitting still with the wheel turned writes nothing. Rewind takes them back with it: wind a run to the start and the asphalt is clean.

There are no hints anywhere: what a level is about is in its geometry, and finding it is the level.

Vehicles

	Length	Turning	Top speed
Hatchback	3.95 m	2.83 m swept ring	2.9 m/s
Van	5.30 m	3.41 m	2.7 m/s
Bus	11.0 m	6.60 m	2.5 m/s
Tour Coach	12.0 m	6.61 m	2.4 m/s
Car + trailer	4.60 m + 4.2 m	3.05 m (car alone)	2.6 m/s
Semi	6.30 m + 13.0 m	4.53 m (tractor alone)	2.3 m/s

The coach and the bus turn almost identically — 4.77 m against 4.70 m of minimum radius — and are a metre apart in length. What separates them is where the wheels sit: the coach's rear axle is 3.9 m forward of its tail, so 1.15 m of it swings outside its own turning circle, against 0.67 m for the bus and 0.07 m for the hatchback. Bigger is not harder in this roster; the worst-steering vehicle in the game is the van, at 5.12 m.

The two articulated combinations are one hinge each — a drawbar behind the tow car's rear axle, a fifth wheel just in front of the tractor's. Both fold if you push the angle past the stop, and both reverse the way real ones do: the trailer steers, and the car chases it.

Your vehicle is the only saturated colour on the map. Everything else — parked cars, dropped trailers, walls, cones — is pastel, so at a glance you always know which shape you are.

Levels

The hatchback series is built so each level asks something the one before it did not — a new kind of problem rather than a tighter version of the last one.

#	Level	Vehicle	What it asks
1	First Bay	Hatchback	A 2.9 m aisle. The bay is behind your shoulder.
2	The Short Side	Hatchback	The room is 1.45 m past the bay and 15 m behind it.
3	Kerbside	Hatchback	The bay is beside the aisle, not across it.
4	The Alcove	Hatchback	4.6 m each side. Reversing in wants 6.5.
5	The Impossible Gap	Hatchback	Can you tell it fits before you commit?
6	Dead End	Hatchback	The room you need is behind you, going nowhere.
7	Van Life	Van	Same puzzle, half a metre more vehicle.
8	Loading Dock	Van	A right-angle turn out of a corridor, into a bay between two vans.
9	Bus Stop	Bus	Parallel park 11 m of bus into a 13.5 m gap.
10	Tail Swing	Tour Coach	Out of your bay and into one two along, with 1.15 m of tail.
11	Trailer Trouble	Car + trailer	Reverse a drawbar trailer into a bay row.
12	Fold	Car + trailer	The trailer goes in the bay. Where does the cab go?
13	Artic Dock	Semi	16.6 m, hinged, into a dock between two others.
14	Yard Full	Semi	The same dock from the far side, in a yard with pillars in it.

Why the levels are the size they are

A vehicle at full lock sweeps a ring of a fixed width — 2.83 m for the hatchback, 6.60 m for the bus. Any corridor narrower than that cannot be turned out of in one arc, which is the line between "drive in" and "shunt it in", and the two corridor levels straddle it deliberately.

Bay levels are cut against different numbers, measured by driving the physics out of a bay at full lock: reversing in needs 6.54 m of aisle past the bay, nose-first needs 1.95 m past it and 4.09 m before it. Which of those you take away is the level.

Tight levels are easy to make impossible by accident. There used to be a hybrid-A* solver in tools/ that proved each one and printed the fewest direction changes it could find; it was removed, because it was the largest thing in the project and everything it produced was for the designer of a set of levels that is finished. What is left is playing them. DESIGN.md constraint 4 records the trade and the measurements worth keeping.

Levels are objects

A level is a list of objects and nothing else:

objects: [
  room(0, -8.475, 9.2, 10.35),
  bays(0, -11, ['hatch', null, 'hatch'], { w: 2.6, d: 5 }),
]

src/objects.js holds the palette — walls, kerbs, pillars, cones, parked vehicles and paint, plus the composites built from them: bay, bays, room, street, docks. Each is a type and its parameters, and expand() turns them into rectangles and paint once, when the world is built.

The numbers a level writes down are the ones it is about: an aisle width, a bay pitch, the length of a street. Everything that follows from those is worked out in src/objects.js — where a car's rear axle has to go so the car sits centred in its bay, where a kerb sits so the road is the width asked for. Levels used to do that arithmetic by hand, and one of them had a bay row and the cars parked in it a metre apart. An editor edits the parameters.

Layout

File
src/geom.js	oriented-rectangle maths: SAT overlap, containment, distance
src/vehicle.js	kinematic bicycle model, articulation, the five vehicle specs
src/colliders.js	obstacles as flat rectangles, shared by renderer and physics
src/objects.js	the palette a level is built from, and what expands it
src/levels.js	all fourteen levels, in metres
src/world.js	scene construction, themes, lighting
src/carMesh.js	vehicle and trailer models, saturated or pastel
src/camera.js	chase / inside / overhead, body-relative
src/panels.js	the three mirrors and the reverse camera, as screen panels
src/rewind.js	the tape the run plays backwards through
src/traces.js	the marks the tyres leave, one ribbon per wheel
src/gamepad.js	Xbox mapping, analog triggers, rumble
src/main.js	game loop, collision resolution, progression
DESIGN.md	the constraints all of the above exist to satisfy

Collision is 2D: every obstacle, and every unit of the vehicle, is a rectangle on the XZ plane, so what you see in the overhead view is exactly what the physics uses. Contact stops the vehicle rather than bouncing it — a binary search on the last sub-step lets it creep right up against a wall instead of freezing short of it. Every contact counts as a crash for that attempt and buzzes the pad — harder hits flash the screen more, but nothing scrapes through for free.