Precision Parking

Thirteen bays and a car that will not cheat for you

Precision Parking is a car park and a steering wheel and nothing else. Nobody is shooting at you, there is no lap to beat and no traffic to dodge — just a painted box somewhere in the lot and a car that behaves like a car: it changes direction only while the wheels are rolling, it has a turning circle you can measure, and reversing swings it the other way. Everything difficult about the game comes out of those three sentences.

You get thirteen bays, each tighter than the last or guarded by something you would rather not scrape.

What actually clears a bay

The whole car has to be inside the painted lines, and it has to be stopped. Once you are in and still, the bay is yours and the panel tells you what it paid. Touch a parked car, a pillar or a wall on the way in and the bay ends there; you start again with the clock at zero.

The green box is the one you want: the pale outline of a car inside it is the shape and the direction you must be in when you stop, so the arrow at the front is worth reading before you touch the throttle.

Reading the mouth before you commit

Every bay is sixty pixels wide and the car is thirty-six, so a clean entry leaves nine pixels a side. The bays that hurt are the ones where a neighbour has parked over its line and taken half of it, which you can see from the far end of the aisle. Treat that bay as narrower than the paint says and come at it from the opposite side, so the correction left for the end is small.

Turn in late. A car that turns in late has room left to straighten; one that turns in early has to back out. Come at the gap from the far side of the aisle, get straight for the last car length, and let it drift in rather than steering between the lines. Steering inside the mouth is how the nine pixels disappear.

The handbrake shortens the car

Space does two jobs and only one of them is stopping. Off the throttle it kills your speed dead, which is how you come to rest without rolling two extra feet into the wall behind the bay. Hold it while still on the throttle and the car drops to a crawl with most of its turning circle taken away: the back end stops tracking the front as faithfully and the car rotates in a smaller space. That crawl is the tool for the last yard of a narrow mouth — throttle at walking pace, handbrake down, wheel over, and the car turns into the gap instead of ploughing across it.

What a bay is worth, in numbers

Each bay has a base value, 1,000 on the first and 2,200 by the last. Time comes off it: six points a second up to the bay's par, twenty-six a second past it. Par runs from sixteen seconds on the easy bays to thirty-four on the last, so a bay you know is worth far more than one you had to think about.

Then there is the parking itself. Stop within five degrees of the direction painted in the bay and you add 300; within eleven degrees, 140. Park nose-out when the arrow asks for nose-in and you score nothing. No bay pays less than 100, so even a scrappy park moves the number, and the running total counts your current bay live as you drive.

Questions that come up in the first ten minutes

Why will the car not turn while it is standing still?

Because a real car will not either, and the whole game is built on that. The heading only changes while the wheels are rolling, so a bay has to be entered at an angle and straightened as you go. If you could spin on the spot, every bay in the lot would collapse into one lazy turn.

Does one dent end the whole run?

No. A dent ends the bay, and the panel offers you the same one again with the clock back at zero. Nothing is banked until a bay is cleared, so retrying costs you only the seconds you already spent. The other twelve bays wait where they were.

Which way does the back of the car swing when I reverse?

The way you point the wheel. Reversing turns the car the opposite way to driving forward, so the steering input that would swing your nose left swings your tail left instead. It takes two or three attempts to stop fighting it, and after that the reverse bays are the fastest ones on the lot.

Is it ever quicker to back into a bay?

Yes, and two of the bays ask for it by painting the arrow the other way round. Backing in gives you a longer approach and a shorter correction, which on a narrow mouth is worth more than the extra seconds it costs.

What is the dashed line outside the bay for?

It marks the axis that bay wants you to approach along, and it only appears on the first four. Use it to get the car straight before you turn in. After bay four you are expected to read the paint.

Why the lot is empty of people and noise

I wanted a driving game where the only opponent is the geometry. No traffic, no rivals, no arrow pointing at the next checkpoint — just a car and a box the car cannot turn around inside. The car is slow at the wheel and quick on the brakes, because this is about placing a car rather than throwing one.