Small Paws, Big Karts

Animal bumper-kart racing through Myanmar, sun to monsoon.

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Inspiration

We wanted a racing game that feels warm and small in the hand: a red panda in a bumper kart, rolling past brick temples at sunset. The three routes are inspired by places in Myanmar (Bagan, Yangon, and Mandalay), shown at golden hour with long evening shadows, dusty red earth, and lake reflections.

The game is made by Win's VPN Inc., a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization working for human rights, internet freedom, and cybersecurity. We wanted a game that is fun on its own and that also gives players a simple, optional way to support that work.

Where we want to take it. Paw Kart Tour is the name of the wider project: a racing game first, then a world built around cars and the places they drive through.

  • The game and its characters come first. The long-term plan includes an animated series, a film, toys, and licensing. None of that exists yet.
  • Learn how cars work without a quiz. Many people drive every day and know little about how a car works. The plan is to teach through consequences: change the tires and feel the kart handle differently. The garage already models tires, engines, oils, and fuels (this release ships the stock parts), and tires wear, and the weather changes grip in every race today.
  • Heritage and culture. Bagan, our first route, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site (inscribed 2019). Later routes are meant to carry recognizable architecture, short optional notes, and more World Heritage locations.
  • Partnerships. We would like to work with heritage, museum, tourism, road-safety, and automotive organizations. None exist yet.

What it does

Small Paws, Big Karts is an arcade bumper-kart racer for phones and tablets. This first public version is an early release: you race three bots on each of three routes, with a garage, kart lights, and the Supporter Pack. Better graphics are coming.

  • Bumper Battle: three laps, four karts, one finish line. Bump rivals off your line, fire a hit at the nearest kart, and raise your shield at the right moment. Your kart has armor and stamina. If the armor runs out, you respawn at the last checkpoint.
  • More to manage in a race: tires wear down and the pit lane fits fresh ones, and banana peels and rocket boosts sit on the track as pickups.
  • Ten racers: red panda, fennec, corgi, Shih Tzu, German shepherd, domestic shorthair, Maltese, exotic shorthair, French bulldog, and mini poodle, each with a Bumper Classic, Temple Runner, or Dust Hauler kart. Pick your favorite in the garage.
  • Three routes: Bagan Temple Road (it follows real OpenStreetMap roads, credited in the game), Yangon Kandawgyi Loop, and Mandalay Citadel Cub Corner.
  • Weather that changes from race to race: golden sun, grey skies, light rain, monsoon downpours, morning mist, and dust haze. Each city has its own climate (Yangon is the wettest), and the weather changes how your tires grip and wear.
  • Kart lights: pick the color of your kart's trim and underglow. Four colors are free in this release.
  • Play your way: touch buttons or a stick, or a game controller. Settings include volume, reduced motion, a text size for the race HUD, and a stick switch.
  • Sound made in code: engines, tires, road surfaces, impacts, pickups, and ambience are generated by the game's own audio engine.
  • No ads. Every purchase and every link that opens a browser sits behind an "adult check."
  • Supporter Pack: a one-time purchase, powered by RevenueCat, that adds the Supporter Lime kart light color and a Supporter badge in the Garage. It changes how your kart looks and nothing else. Purchases support Win's VPN Inc.

How we built it

  • Engine and code: Unity 6 (6000.3.23f1) and C#. The racing rules (race lifecycle, checkpoints, armor and stamina, shield, and respawn) live in an engine-independent C# library with its own .NET tests, so the rules are tested without the Unity runtime. The repository holds more than 150 .NET test programs, and one Unity layout suite alone runs 14,978 checks.
  • Purchases: the RevenueCat Unity SDK (purchases-unity 9.10.1). The Supporter Pack is a non-consumable product (pawkart_supporter_pack) in the RevenueCat offering default. It is delivered on the device from the RevenueCat entitlement pawkart_supporter, with no account and no game server. The game reads ownership live from the store, so a refund locks the color and badge again. Restore Purchases works through RevenueCat too.
  • Native bridges: small native plugins for iOS (Objective-C++: display and refresh rate, thermal state, accessibility, external display, and a continuous clock), Android (Java), and macOS (StoreKit and account bundles).
  • Art: 3D assets are modelled in Blender, and much of the route scenery (for example, the Bagan stupas) is generated by Blender Python scripts kept in the repository. The red panda portrait in the icon and store art is AI-assisted. That is disclosed in Settings > Legal > Credits.
  • Platforms: one codebase builds for iPhone and iPad, Android, and the Samsung Galaxy Store. Mac is included on the same App Store record as iPhone and iPad. A Windows build is being submitted to the Microsoft Store.
  • Performance targets: a 60 fps floor on every device, 120 Hz by default on iPhone, and HDR on iOS. On Android the game asks the display for its fastest mode at the current resolution and steps down, never below 60, if the device cannot keep up. These are requests and targets, not a promise of sustained frame rates on every phone.
  • A multi-model engineering process: AI coding agents wrote the code in parallel lanes, each in its own copy of the repository, with a human owner making the product calls. Claude (Claude Code) wrote and orchestrated most of the lanes. GPT-6 Sol (Codex) and Claude Fable 5.1 reviewed the code, the security of the backend, and the graphics, and each confirmed finding went into a fix round. High-stakes decisions, such as the privacy policy and terms and the account and purchase design, went through a written council of models from different vendors that had to agree on the exact text, with a signed record of the result. Every behavioral fix needs a test that fails on the old code, and device QA runs the real game on an iPhone 16 Pro Max, Android phones, and a Windows laptop through a scripted autopilot.

Challenges we ran into

  • Losing the working tree. On 2026-09-28 an accidental disk cleanup deleted the working copy of the project. We rebuilt it from editor snapshots and a private GitHub backup, regenerated 3D models from their original Blender scripts, and now push to the backup after every merge.
  • Frame rate on phones. Golden-hour lighting, fur, and weather are heavy on a phone. Holding a 60 fps floor (and 120 Hz on iPhone) meant a thermal governor, refresh-rate ladders, and many measured device runs.
  • Honest purchases. Store rules and our own legal texts say a game purchase is not a donation. We had to design the shop copy, the adult check, and the Supporter Pack so the value to the player is clear (an exclusive kart light color and a badge) while saying truthfully that purchases support a nonprofit.
  • Several platforms, one game. Touch, keyboard, mouse, and gamepad all had to feel native, with the right button prompts and layouts on each. The Galaxy Store build also had to have no dependency on Google services, so a separate edition strips out Play Billing and RevenueCat.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • A complete, playable racer from one codebase, with ten animal racers, three routes, and six weather looks, on iPhone, iPad, Android, and the Galaxy Store.
  • Thousands of automated assertions (one Unity layout suite alone runs 14,978 checks) across more than 150 .NET test programs and the Unity editor checks, plus on-device autopilot runs.
  • Legal texts (privacy policy, terms, support) that a multi-model council agreed on line by line before the first release.
  • A kart light palette chosen by a search that keeps the colors apart for normal vision and for the common types of color-blind vision.
  • Recovering the whole project in about a day after the working tree was lost, without losing the release date.

What we learned

  • Independent reviewers from different model vendors catch different bugs. A reviewer that did not write the code is worth far more than a second pass by the author.
  • Put the game rules in a plain library with fast tests. It made the Unity side much safer to change.
  • Back up early and push often. A private remote saved the project.
  • RevenueCat let us add a real purchase without building purchase validation on our own server first.

What's next

This release is an early (beta) release, and better graphics are coming soon. After that:

  • Online races: Quick races, 1v1 duels, and private rooms with room codes, with a fixed set of emoji reactions and no text or voice chat.
  • Small Paws, Big Karts Pro: an optional subscription with a daily Paw Coin bonus and a 1.5x trophy boost, through RevenueCat.
  • Paw Coins: earned by playing and available in coin packs for garage parts, trophy boosts, and kart looks.
  • Trophies, global rankings, and daily rewards.
  • A graphics upgrade for the racers, karts, and routes.
  • Car know-how in the garage: short, playful explanations of what each real kart part does.
  • More UNESCO World Heritage Site routes beyond Bagan.
  • Paw Kart Tour beyond games: animated series and film ideas with the same racers (long-term vision).

Monetization

Small Paws, Big Karts is free to play with no ads. In this first release there is one optional in-app purchase on iOS and Google Play: the Supporter Pack, a one-time, non-consumable purchase for US $2.99 (prices vary by market). It adds the Supporter Lime kart light color and a Supporter badge in the garage. It is purely cosmetic and never changes race speed or health. The purchase is powered by the RevenueCat SDK: the product is in the RevenueCat default offering and is delivered on the device from the pawkart_supporter entitlement, and Restore Purchases also goes through RevenueCat. Every purchase asks for an "adult check" first. Purchases from Small Paws and Big Karts support Win's VPN Inc., a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization working for human rights, internet freedom, and cybersecurity. A game purchase buys the digital item shown; it is not a charitable donation and is not tax-deductible. The Galaxy Store build sells nothing. Next, the same RevenueCat setup will carry Small Paws, Big Karts Pro (an auto-renewing subscription with a daily Paw Coin bonus and a 1.5x trophy boost), and Paw Coin packs when online races launch.

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