Inspiration
Everyone knows what it feels like to be hangry. It is a state change, not a mood -- the world genuinely looks worse, people are more annoying, and you make bad decisions. I wanted a game where that was literally true, so hunger became a world switch rather than a stat bar: let the characters get hungry and the palette, the music, and the creatures all turn on you.
The rest came from the road trip that frames it. Two feline friends driving a surreal Americana highway toward a diner, running on fumes, snacking to stay sane.
What it does
Hangry Highway is a one-thumb survival and resource-management driving game. You drag left and right to steer down a procedurally generated road toward a diner 66 miles away, and the only thing that can end the run is an empty fuel tank.
Creatures drain your fuel on contact, so holding a clear lane is the core skill. Your weapon fires automatically and the creatures leave resource drops you have to steer over to collect. Fuel cans and snacks appear on the road too: fuel keeps you alive right now, snacks keep you well-fed, which halves your fuel drain.
Hunger is the twist. Let it fall and the world flips hangry -- red palette, hostile creatures, faster drain -- but that state is the only source of the rarest crafting resources. Starving yourself is a deliberate, timed risk rather than a failure state.
At forks you choose a biome by steering into it, and Rest Stops let you pick an upgrade recipe that then builds itself once you have collected the ingredients.
How we built it
Three.js, but deliberately 2.5D: sprite billboards on a real 3D ground plane, so the game reads as a flat illustrated world while the road actually bends in perspective.
Challenges we ran into
- Road generation. Making the road bend and fork meant giving up the idea of a road as a static piece of geometry. It became a curve sampled per frame, and a pending fork has to draw both unresolved branches at once -- with the scenery, pickups, and enemies on each branch growing independently until the player commits to one.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- Fun game -- people who play it say it's fun and unique.
- The hangry mechanic works as designed: hunger drives the palette, the music, the enemies, and the crafting economy all at once, from one variable.
What we learned
- How to clarify mechanics during onboarding. Splitting it into separate, paced beats, and pulling guidance forward so it arrives before the moment it is about, did more for comprehension than any UI change.
- Simulated players encode assumptions as strongly as constants do. Every AI player in our first simulator ignored creatures, so I spent several rounds tuning a game where combat was decorative and never noticed.
What's next for Hangry Highway (three.js build)
- Keep iterating based on feedback.
- Player-triggered weapons alongside the automatic one, so combat has an active choice in it.
- A deeper recipe tree with more upgrades priced to land late, since right now the pool runs out before the diner does.
- Persistent meta-progression between runs.
- Final art to replace the placeholder scenery.
Built With
- claude
- three.js
