Golden Hour Rash

Five ways to ride

Pick a road, then pick your stakes

Run

Three minutes, one road, one score. Nine named rivals you can punch.

Zen

No rivals, no timer, no score. Just the road and a slow pad.

Daily

The same seeded road for everyone, split Guided and Blind.

Story

Five legs of one night's ride, joined by animated beats.

Survive

Five minutes out of the backstreets, chased. Three wipeouts and it's over.

Story

The Long Way to Sunrise

A rider leaves town at last light and rides through the night to be on the Ridge Pass overlook when the sun comes up. Five legs, each with its own situation to get through, joined by animated beats: a six-stop sky that blends from one time of night to the next, stars that fade, a moon that sets, a headlight thrown down the road in slices.

The closing beat runs predawn to dawn with the sun actually rising over the ridge — it goes through the same bloom the road does, which is where the glow comes from.

The closing story beat: the sun clearing the ridge, the rider standing at the overlook beside the parked bike.

Survive

Five minutes out of the backstreets

A condemned quarter at night: sodium lamps, boarded blocks, chain-link, skips on the kerb. A condition bar runs from 100 and every accident takes a bite. Empty it and you go down, get picked up with a dent in the bar, and carry on. The third time ends the run.

Seven hazards lie in the road, and there is no pattern to learn: gaps come from an exponential distribution rather than fixed spacing, and every hazard's lane is drawn independently.

The riders out here are not the pack. They are hooligans running you out of the area — no race colours, no names, no quarrel with each other. Every swing is aimed at you, and nothing on screen tracks a position, because there is no race on.

The Backstreets at night: tower blocks with lit windows, the condition bar at 44 with one life left.

The pack

Nine riders who race you back

They are not on rails. Each only reads the road as far ahead as their own look-ahead, fights the same centrifugal force you do, hits the same traffic and pays the same price for running wide. Mistakes are emergent, not scripted.

Sable and Marla are the two you will struggle with. Five sit at your level. Vex and Dizzy have the fastest hands and the worst heads. Everyone fights everyone — you will see places change ahead of you that you had nothing to do with.

Late in a race: traffic to thread and a rival three metres up the road with thirty seconds left.

Under it

Built, not bolted together

Roads: 5
Racers: 10
Race length: 3:00
Achievements: 15
Run modifiers: 7
Cameras: 3

Segment-based pseudo-3D projection — the OutRun and Road Rash technique, no real geometry.
Every note is synthesised at runtime: each road has its own key, kit and tempo, and Zen keeps the key while dropping the drums.
Post-processing does supersampling, a bright-pass bloom and a speed blur, and steps itself down if frames get long.
F1-style gaps and intervals at the flag, and a record room that keeps the top ten.
Colourblind-safe rider palette, reduced-motion mode, and a brightness control for dusk on a bright panel.

Play it

Download, or run from source

The macOS build is ad-hoc signed rather than notarised, so the first launch needs right-click → Open. Everything else runs from source on Python 3.10 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/Shubham080802/golden-hour-rash
cd golden-hour-rash
pip install -r requirements.txt
python main.py

Get the latest release Read the README

Playable in the browser? Not yet. A WebAssembly build is in progress (python tools/build_web.py) and is not finished — for now the game is a desktop application.