About Daily Dirt Rally
An independent browser racing game with one track a day, built and run by one person. Here is who makes it, how it works, and what it is honestly capable of today.
What the game is
Daily Dirt Rally is a free top-down racing game that runs in a browser. Every day the server generates a new dirt circuit from the calendar date, and every player in the world gets that same circuit until the date rolls over. You drive three laps against the clock, alone or in a lobby of up to four, and the fastest ten runs of the day are listed on the front page until midnight clears the board.
The design goal was a game you can finish in five minutes and come back to tomorrow. No account, no progression, no unlocks, nothing to buy — just a track that is the same for everyone and a clock that does not care who you are.
Who makes it
Daily Dirt Rally is written, hosted and maintained by Donald Harris, an independent developer. It is not a studio, a publisher or a network — it is one person and a small server. If something on the site is broken, wrong or unfair, the person who can fix it reads contact@dailydirtrally.com and answers it personally.
The retro-future broadcast framing — BASH TV, the 2088 setting, the CRT styling — is the game’s fiction and nothing more. There is no television network, no corporation and no affiliation with any real broadcaster, manufacturer or motorsport organisation. It is set dressing for an arcade racer, and we would rather label it clearly than have anyone wonder.
How the daily track works
The date string is hashed into a seed for a deterministic random number generator. That generator drives a loop-expansion algorithm: a 2×2 ring of grid cells is pushed outward fifteen to twenty-four times, each push replacing a straight run with a detour, until a rectilinear circuit emerges. Each cell becomes one of sixteen tiles chosen by which neighbours it connects to, and each tile carries a collision mask taken from its own artwork so the drivable boundary matches the pixels you can see.
Because the whole layout is a function of the date, nothing needs to be stored or distributed for players to share a track. The full walkthrough is in the track generation guide.
How it is built
| Layer | Technology | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Rendering & physics | Phaser 3 | Canvas rendering, arcade physics, particles, camera and input at 60 frames per second. |
| Interface | React with a small custom router | The site around the game: landing page, lobby, leaderboards and these guides. |
| Multiplayer | Socket.IO on Node.js | Four-player rooms, invite codes, AI drivers and roughly twenty position updates a second. |
| Data | Prisma with SQLite | Daily track records and leaderboard entries. Deliberately small. |
| Hosting | A single small Linux server | nginx terminating HTTPS with an automatically renewing certificate, proxying the Node app. |
What it does not do yet
An honest list is more useful than a marketing one, so:
- No touch controls. The game needs a physical keyboard. Phones can read the site but cannot drive.
- No per-surface friction. The generator carries grip values for asphalt, mud, sand and gravel, but nothing reads them while you are driving, and daily tracks are currently cut entirely as dirt. Being on or off the track is the only thing that changes your speed.
- No server-side verification of lap times. Times are measured in your browser. Implausible entries get removed by hand when spotted.
- No replaying past tracks from the interface, though the data is deterministic and the feature is wanted.
All four are on the roadmap and will be recorded in the changelog when they land, rather than announced in advance.
How the site is paid for
Hosting is currently paid for out of pocket. The site briefly carried third-party ad scripts in 2026 and they were removed because they degraded the experience. If advertising returns it will be confined to written pages like this one — never the game screen, the lobby or a loading screen — and the privacy policy will describe the cookies involved before any of it appears.
Get in touch
Bug reports, physics questions, track-data experiments and complaints about the AI are all welcome at contact@dailydirtrally.com or through the contact form. Reports that include your browser and the track date get fixed fastest.