The brief
I’ve got two small round displays with a knob around the screen, and they live in two different houses. I wanted a Mario Kart 64 style racing game that two people could play against each other on them over the internet. The other person also needed to be able to set theirs up with just the device and a phone.
The solution
Dial Kart runs on an ESP32 board with a 1.28 inch round screen. You turn the knob to steer and push it for a boost. Races are three laps, grass slows you down and the orange pads speed you up. The art, the track and the name are all original.
The two devices find each other online and the race starts once both players press ready. To get it on wifi you hold the knob down, a QR code comes up, and you put the wifi password in on your phone.
I built it with Claude in an evening. The first go set up wifi with a script on my laptop, which was no good for someone in another house, so we redid that part to work from a phone.
What it solves
Two people in different houses can race each other with just the device and their home wifi, and nobody needs a laptop to get started. The knob also turned out to work pretty well for steering.
What’s next
Racing solo works and one device is online. We haven’t had a proper race between the two devices yet, so that’s first. After that I want updates to come over wifi so the second device never has to be plugged into a computer again.