HANGRY
Employer: Game Pill
Primary Role: Lead game & combat designer
Extra Credits: Writing, QA testing, media production, sound design
Check out the trailer! ↑
HANGRY is an upcoming 3rd-person "snack 'n' slash" RPG. Play as a beastly mercenary hunting down fierce, food-inspired monsters to collect their ingredients and bring them back to an underworld diner.
I was a crucial team member in this project's development since shortly after its conception, helping with early prototypes and taking on a lead role throughout the course of pre-production and full production.
My primary areas of focus were combat mechanics, player character attacks & abilities, upgrades, and progression.
Challenges & Solutions
One of the greatest challenges I had to tackle as a designer for HANGRY was the incorporation of hunger and eating into a melee combat system. This started out as a "calorie meter" which was a spectrum that affected the player's stats and abilities as it shifted from one end to the other.
While it seemed promising at first, testers didn't like how little control they felt while playing, and keeping track of all the changing abilities was too much of a chore.
This system went through countless iterations, but in the end I'm happy with where it landed. The player can use a satisfying "bite" attack on exposed enemy ingredients to simultaneously deal damage and restore resources mid-combat, making it fluid, easy to understand, and achieve the desired feeling.
An early prototype phase, showing a hunger "state" with different effects.
An early mockup of the evolution tree.
Another major challenge to overcome was the evolving aspect of the player character, who is able to take on the properties of the things he eats. Initially, I wanted to give him the ability to literally steal and use the special attacks of each enemy after biting them (this was even prototyped), but the feature was unfortunately cut due to its complexity.
In the end, I still managed to design an evolution system based around consuming food and using the resulting "Calories" to unlock upgrades to the player's choice of various body parts. The player can also upgrade their weapons this way!
Finally, a personal challenge of this project was learning to work on a team that was much bigger than I had ever experienced before. I needed to communicate effectively with people from multiple different disciplines in multiple different time zones, often all at once! Successfully retaining a cohesive design and vision for the game amongst all the diverse hands and eyes that played a part in it was a daunting task.
Despite the hardships endured in this project, I have learned so much, and gained incredibly valuable experience through working on HANGRY. And I have full confidence that I am a better designer now than when I started it.
A tool used to mind map the early game progression.
Accomplishments
Since my work on the game began, I have:
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Designed, tested, and iterated on multiple combat mechanics and intertwining systems
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Designed 80+ attacks for the main character across 5 different weapons
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Designed 100+ upgrades for the main character via a skill tree system
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Planned the player's progress and mission parameters across 16 main story missions
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Helped to write additional dialogue to bring the world and characters to life
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Created informative videos to show off features to publishers & investors
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Written a full GDD and helped manage Kanban boards & tasks for the team
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Collaborated with artists, programmers, QA testers, students, streamers, and more to help make the game successful
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Attended GDC 2024 to passionately showcase and pitch the game to a wide audience
Steam Page
Check out the game on Steam here if you'd like!