{"slug": "buddy", "title": "Buddy", "summary": "A trivia driving game called 'Road Trip With Your Buddy' was built by developers @rae_codes and @ifeanyichima for the June Solstice Game Jam. The game combines automatic driving with history questions about Juneteenth, civil rights, women's suffrage, Alan Turing, and World Cup soccer, aiming to make learning feel like an arcade game. Built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS, it features a custom timer and localStorage persistence.", "body_md": "*This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam*\n\nRoad 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\n🔗 Play it live: [https://road-buddy.netlify.app](https://road-buddy.netlify.app)\n\nThis is a [Next.js](https://nextjs.org) project bootstrapped with [ create-next-app](https://github.com/vercel/next.js/tree/canary/packages/create-next-app).\n\nFirst, run the development server:\n\n```\nnpm run dev\n# or\nyarn dev\n# or\npnpm dev\n# or\nbun dev\n```\n\nOpen [http://localhost:3000](http://localhost:3000) with your browser to see the result.\n\nYou can start editing the page by modifying `app/page.js`\n\n. The page auto-updates as you edit the file.\n\nThis project uses [ next/font](https://nextjs.org/docs/app/building-your-application/optimizing/fonts) to automatically optimize and load\n\nTo learn more about Next.js, take a look at the following resources:\n\nYou can check out [the Next.js GitHub repository](https://github.com/vercel/next.js) - your feedback and contributions are welcome!\n\nThe easiest way to deploy your Next.js app is to use the [Vercel Platform](https://vercel.com/new?utm_medium=default-template&filter=next.js&utm_source=create-next-app&utm_campaign=create-next-app-readme) from the creators of Next.js.\n\nCheck out our [Next.js deployment documentation](https://nextjs.org/docs/app/building-your-application/deploying) for more…\n\nThe 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.\n\nGame 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.\n\nA custom hook-based timer schedules the next question only after the current one is answered, avoiding the classic bug where a slow `setInterval`\n\ncauses questions to stack up back to back.\n\nSubmitting 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.\n\nBuilt by [@rae_codes](https://dev.to/rae_codes) and [@ifeanyichima](https://dev.to/ifeanyichima).", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/buddy", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/rae_codes/buddy-22mk", "published_at": "2026-06-20 14:06:58+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-20 14:37:22.577427+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["developer-tools", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["@rae_codes", "@ifeanyichima", "Next.js", "Tailwind CSS", "Alan Turing", "Netlify", "Vercel", "GitHub"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/buddy", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/buddy.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/buddy.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/buddy.jsonld"}}