Raccoon Raider

It’s trash day, and the raccoons are hungry. Ride your bike, squirt them with your water blaster, and protect the bins long enough for the truck to fill up — as fast as you possibly can.

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What it is

Raccoon Raider is the arcade’s action game. You’re a kid on a bike with a water blaster, and the neighbourhood’s raccoons keep sneaking out of the yards to raid the trash cans. A big blue truck drives its route, emptying each bin into the hopper — but if a raccoon knocks a can over first, the trash spills and the truck has to stop and clean it up, costing you precious time. So you race around town, squirting raccoons off the cans before they can make a mess, grabbing water-blaster and bike upgrades as you go.

You can’t lose — a rough run just means a slower time. The whole game is a race against the clock, which makes it endlessly re-runnable when there’s a leaderboard time to beat.

How to play

Ride — drag the joystick with your left thumb, or use WASD / the arrow keys on a computer.

Blast — press the BLAST button (or the space bar) to squirt water in the way you’re facing.

Grab upgrades — ride over a 💦 for a stronger blaster or a 🚲 for more speed.

Mind the water — your bike can’t ride through the creek. Cross on the bridge.

The goal

Fill the trash truck as fast as you can. Every can the truck collects fills the hopper a little more; every can a raccoon wrecks slows it down. Your time when the truck is full is your score. There are three neighbourhoods to master, each harder than the last.

Tips & strategy

Intercept, don’t chase. Raccoons eat fast — under a second once they reach a can. You can’t stroll over and scrub them off; you have to meet them on the way in.
Ride ahead of the truck. The truck follows a fixed route, so defend the cans it’s about to reach rather than the ones it already passed.
Grab every upgrade. A wider, faster blaster and a quicker bike compound — the players with the best times snatch upgrades early.
Respect the creek. On the later levels you have to loop to the bridge, so guard the far bank early and don’t get caught on the wrong side when a raccoon appears across the water.
A calm run is a fast run. One prevented spill saves several seconds — steady defence beats frantic circling.

Behind this game

Raccoon Raider came from a very specific complaint at the kitchen table: the first version was too easy, so everyone got nearly the same time and the leaderboard was a wall of ties. The fix was a rethink — make the raccoons eat almost instantly and come from every direction, so the game became about anticipation instead of clean-up. Then, to make the three levels feel genuinely different, we gave each its own neighbourhood, and added a creek with a bridge you have to cross. The bins are blue because that’s what the real ones on our street look like.

Updates

Three distinct neighbourhoods

Levels two and three now have their own maps — a creek that splits the street with a bridge to cross, and a creek-and-pond layout — instead of the same street three times.

A real challenge

Raccoons now eat trash in under a second, spawn from yards all over the map, and head for the nearest can — so you have to intercept rather than clean up. The truck runs a full down-and-back route.

Blue bins & smoother phones

Recoloured the cans municipal blue and hardened the mobile controls so holding the joystick and BLAST at once won’t pinch-zoom the page.

More games to play

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