Mushroom Hollow
A 3D foraging game set in an autumn forest. You have three minutes to fill a basket with mushrooms, and the fly agarics make you dizzy. Designed through twenty questions and built in a single evening.
Play the game →- Genre
- 3D action platformer, three-minute rounds
- Tech
- Three.js in a single HTML file
- Method
- Twenty design questions, a design document, then one build
- Built with
- Claude as coding partner
- Status
- Playable online. Not yet balanced through playtests.
The game
You play Pip, a small forager in an orange knitted hat with a basket on his back. The forest floor is covered in mushrooms, and you have three minutes to collect as many as you can.
Porcini are worth 10 points and chanterelles 15. Now and then a golden porcini appears on top of a rock or a stump, marked by a beam of light. It is worth 50, but you have to jump to reach it.
Fly agarics are the enemy. Pick one up and Pip is dizzy for three seconds: the controls flip and the camera sways. The number of fly agarics grows as the round goes on. After two minutes they start hopping after you. Jump on their heads and you get 25 points.
Picking mushrooms less than two seconds apart builds a combo of up to ×5. Three power-ups turn up during a round: a feather for speed, a magnet basket that pulls mushrooms in, and an antidote leaf that makes you immune to poison. The best five scores are saved in your browser.
Stages
- DesignTwenty questions answered and collected in a design document.
- BuildThe full game built as one HTML file in a single evening.
- PlaytestFirst rounds, to find what feels wrong.
How I made it
This time I tried a different method from Vokseværk. Instead of building in stages, I asked Claude to act as a game developer and interview me first. It asked twenty questions, from the core idea through controls and difficulty to sound and file format. Each question came with examples of what the choices would mean in practice, such as what 3D costs compared with 2D.
My answers went into a design document. Then Claude built the whole game from that document in one go, as a single HTML file. I own the idea and the decisions. Claude wrote all the code.
- Twenty questions took about ten minutes to answer. Most of the design work was choosing, not writing.
- I asked for a well-known comic character as the hero and classic platformer sounds. Both are protected, so Pip and the 8-bit sound effects are original instead.
- I chose full functionality over a minimum version. The game was small enough for that to work, but it means everything arrived at once, untested.
- Everything is drawn in code. There are no 3D models or sound files, which keeps it to one file of about 60 KB.
What I learned about the method
The questions forced me to decide things I would normally discover halfway through: how a round ends, what makes it harder over time, what a power-up is for. That made the build fast.
The weakness is the opposite of Vokseværk. There, every stage was played before the next began. Here, nothing has been played properly yet. The design is only a guess until someone plays it.
Next step
Play a round and write down the three things that annoy me most. Fix exactly those, one at a time, the same way as in Vokseværk.