HALL PASS: Survive the Night

A survivors-like built from what players asked for. Build your deck, pick your crew, and clear a haunted school before First Bell. Free on iPhone and in any browser.

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Inspiration

Vampire Survivors reached over 27 million players and turned a small idea into a whole genre. For Shipaton I didn't want to guess what players of that genre wanted, so I did my homework first.

I used Claude to read 72,908 English Steam reviews across 10 survivors-likes and 1,339,690 Reddit comments across 8 genre subreddits, then sorted what people praised, what made them quit, and what they kept asking for and could not find. Three answers stood out:

  • Luck. The loudest complaint: runs decided by whatever the game happens to hand you.
  • Grind. Hours of farming just to stand a chance.
  • Runs anywhere. The most requested thing on Reddit was a game you can play wherever you are.

HALL PASS is my answer to those three.

What it does

You play one of four students in the After School Exorcism Club. When the school locks up at 9 PM, curses flood the halls, and you clear it one room per hour until First Bell.

  • Your deck is your plan, not a dice roll. Before a run you build a hand of cards from your club deck. The run starts from choices you made, not from a random draw.
  • Your deck grows by beating bosses. Every room has a boss, and beating one earns its signature card. Progress comes from winning fights, not from replaying the same run to farm currency.
  • Built for your phone. Twin-stick touch controls and short Room Runs, or take your crew through all ten rooms in a School Run. It also runs in any desktop browser at hallpass.cc, instantly, with no account.
  • Four students, four Domains. Ren, Yui, Kaito and Sora each have a signature weapon and a Domain that changes the rules of the room.

How we built it

HALL PASS is a solo build. The game runs on Three.js and WebGL in plain JavaScript, wrapped with Capacitor for iOS, and served on the web from Netlify.

Claude did the research reading and was my pair programmer throughout: deterministic seeded bot runs to tune difficulty, a level editor, asset pipelines, and a replay camera rig that films real engine footage frame for frame (the wide gameplay shots in the video come from it).

Monetization is optional and handled by RevenueCat: Coin Boosts multiply the coins you bank for a number of surviving runs (1.5x for 10 runs, 2x for 30). Nothing in the game requires them, and there are no ads on iOS.

Challenges

  • Readable chaos. A survivors-like is hundreds of things on screen. A lot of the work went into warnings, colour and motion that tell you what a boss is about to do while the room is full.
  • Honest difficulty. Players hate luck deciding a run, so difficulty is tuned with seeded bot runs and adaptive mercy rather than random swings.
  • Shipping to the App Store as a solo developer, including getting in-app purchases through review.

What I learned

Reading what thousands of players actually said is a better design brief than any of my own guesses. I didn't build everything people asked for. I built answers to what they asked for most.

What's next

More rooms and bosses, more cards for each student, and Android.

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