Dank Nooner

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What is it?

Dank Nooner is an open-world multiplayer motorcycle game about doing every stupid thing you’d never try in real life. Pull wheelies, stoppies, and backflips, weave through traffic, and race your friends around a neon city. It mixes realistic bike controls with arcade trick mechanics and a high skill ceiling.

Best played with a controller! But Keyboard + Mouse works too.

What’s in the game now:

• Multiplayer: Host a lobby and invite your friends. Free roam together, or roll into an event circle on the map to start a race or a trick battle.
• Tricks & combos: Wheelies, stoppies, drifts, burnouts, flips, barrel rolls, supermans, kickflips, and more. Chain tricks together to build a combo, and your combo fills up your boost meter.
• Game modes:
  • Race and Street Race (with traffic)
  • Stunt Race: Mario Kart meets stunting. Tricks earn points, and item pickups like the bat, oil slick, shotgun, and deployable ramp let you knock out other riders.
  • Time Attack: beat your best lap time
  • Trick Battle: timed rounds, highest trick score wins
  • Megaramp trick comp: one jump, best trick wins
• Fuel-up minigame: Some races start at the gas pump. Fill up in first person, but don’t spill or it’ll cost you.
• Garage: A GTA style customization shop. Buy bike skins, pick colors, characters, and horns, and save them as loadouts. A few characters made the trip over from Guac & Load.
• Money & XP: Every event pays out based on where you placed and how well you scored.
• Traffic: Cars and bikes drive around the city, with intersections and traffic lights. Hit one and you’re ragdolling.
• Physics-based controls: Manage clutch, throttle, and balance. Get sloppy and you’ll get speed wobbles. Bail and you’ll ragdoll.

What’s next

• Steam release: The store page is up, so wishlist it! The plan is a demo first, aiming for Steam Next Fest in February 2027.
• Story mode: Simpsons Hit & Run style. Start out on a mini bike on the bad side of town, work your way up to the big city on a naked bike, and end up in a quiet beach town. Each chapter comes with its own bike.
• A bigger map: “Highside Island”, big enough to cruise around like Test Drive Unlimited, with a city, mountain roads, and an interstate loop that ties it all together.
• Progression: Medals for each event, collectibles hidden in trick spots, and more bikes to unlock.
• More tricks: Whips, grinds, and more ways to mix tricks together.

How it’s built

Dank Nooner is the most technically involved project I’ve built. It’s a server-authoritative multiplayer game: clients capture input and predict movement locally, while the server runs the authoritative physics and reconciles any mismatches. Networking runs over WebRTC, with NAT punch-through and a relay fallback so people can actually connect. I’m adding Steam lobbies and friend invites on top of that.

The player is built with composition, a stack of focused controllers (movement, gearing, tricks, crashes, animation, camera) that each do one thing and run in sequence every tick. Game modes are built the same way. A race is a shared race loop plus small components for scoring, items, challenges, and the leaderboard, so Stunt Race, Street Race, and Time Attack all run on the same code.

Menus and game modes run on state machines, audio goes through FMOD, and I wrote a procedural animation system with inverse kinematics so the rider leans and reacts without hand-made animations. I wrote a whole blog post on the IK work.

It’s all open source, check out the code at https://github.com/ssebs/DankNooner

Where it started

Dank Nooner started out as a simple wheelie balance game I made after Guac & Load. You held a wheelie as long as you could and spent your points on bike upgrades. I had enough fun with it that I started over and turned it into the open-world game it is now.

Read more about the original in Dank Nooner: The Beginnings.