Hole-in-the-ground city eater in a toy town: swallow, grow, survive the city fighting back. three.js + procedural Blender (MCP) art, static on GitHub Pages.
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You are a hole in a toy town. Swallow anything smaller than you, grow until skyscrapers fit, and keep eating — or the ground seals over you.
The city fights back as you grow: police barricades, cement trucks, helicopters dropping concrete, and tanks.
Clear the town and the hole breaks out across a whole island of villages, castles, towns and a capital, with the army trying to cap it for good.
Inspired by Hole.io (Voodoo): the swallow-what-fits core loop is theirs; the toy-town look, hunger, heat, rivals and the
island-scale second phase are this project's own spin on it.
You are a hole in a toy town. Swallow anything smaller than you, grow until skyscrapers fit, and keep eating — or the ground seals over you.
The city fights back as you grow: police barricades, cement trucks, helicopters dropping concrete, and tanks.
Clear the town and the hole breaks out across a whole island of villages, castles, towns and a capital, with the army trying to cap it for good.
Inspired by Hole.io (Voodoo): the swallow-what-fits core loop is theirs; the toy-town look, hunger, heat, rivals and the
island-scale second phase are this project's own spin on it.
Grow: everything has a size. Swallow what fits; each bite widens the hole by a share of the object's footprint —
crumbs much smaller than you barely count, so you have to keep chasing real meals.
Starve: a belly meter drains, and faster the longer the run goes on. Keep eating or you shrink — too small and the ground seals.
Cravings: every so often the void wants something specific (3 cars, 4 people, 2 buildings…) against the clock. Satisfy it for a full belly, a combo kick and dust; miss it and you go hungry.
Heat ★1–4: set by the higher of your size and your notoriety — eating police, units, buildings and cars makes the city hunt you;
it cools only while you lay low. Police chase and ram, barricades toll you, cement trucks pour, helicopters drop concrete (red warning rings),
tanks shell. Concrete stays wet for a while: sit in it and you slow down and shrink. From ★2 people evacuate into buildings, so food thins out.
Rival holes: other holes eat the same city. Bigger swallows smaller — including you.
Poison: gas cans shrink you, toxic barrels reverse your controls, spiky art jams the hole. Oversized cars can clog it.
Win: swallow every building. Clear time is your score; the Daily city is the same map for everyone that day.
Breakout: clear the town and the ground gives way. The hole escapes into the countryside, and now whole settlements
are the meal: farmsteads, villages, a castle on its hill, a market town, an industrial valley and the capital. Buildings
crumble into the hole, roads are the fast lanes, towns evacuate, and the army answers with roadblocks, artillery, strike
jets and heavy-lift choppers dropping Void Lids, until the Capper rolls out of the capital. Swallow the capital and the world changes (below).
The country is an island: the coast is the map edge and a snowy range walls off one side; the land rolls, and the hole
is slower uphill. Two rival holes break out of far settlements, and a minimap shows the whole island.
Ascension (Phase 3): when the capital falls the world goes quiet, the island cracks to its coast and the hole rips outward, eating the shore, then one long zoom
climbs through the clouds to orbit: the curved limb, the stars, the Moon, a glowing wound beside a coast. The planet is the new map (?planet starts there;
__ascend() from a ?region run replays the cinematic).
Planet adversity (Phase 3): a DEFCON director (T1-T2 gentle, T3-T4 extinction-level) throws nukes and MIRVs, orbital lances and a sweeping laser, bomber wings, carrier groups with cruise salvos, tsunamis and volcanoes at you — every one telegraphed (a ring locked for 1.5 s or more), none worth more than 25% of your size — and two rival holes (the Maw, the World-Eater) hunt you on the sphere, bigger than you until you out-grow and swallow them. Set pieces: the Aegis (swallow its six platforms before the lid closes) and the planet-cracker (swallow its three power stations or dodge the beam). Everything is edible or avoidable; swallowing the weapons is the game's best moment.
Controls: mouse, touch-drag or WASD · Space / right-click / E fire abilities · M mutes.
How it's made
Engine:three.jsWebGPURenderer + Vite, every shader written in TSL (three's node shading language).
Runs on WebGPU and falls back to WebGL2 automatically (force it with ?webgl). Static build, no backend — runs on GitHub Pages.
Rendering: physically based sky with sky-lit IBL, 4K soft sun shadows, aerial-perspective fog, GTAO ambient occlusion,
HDR bloom, ACES filmic tonemapping with per-time-of-day exposure and a per-time-of-day 3D LUT grade, screen-space light shafts
at golden hour and dusk, SMAA, vignette, lens fringe and film grain. Fair rides, festoons and runway lights run chase patterns
that bloom; fireworks are GPU particles.
Materials: 16 CC0 scanned PBR materials from Poly Haven (asphalt, paving, grass, brick, roof tiles, bark,
rock…) packed into texture arrays. Every palette swatch maps to a scan, projected triplanar with tangent-free surface-gradient
normal mapping, so toy models get real albedo, normal, roughness and AO detail; flat ground gets parallax occlusion on high.
Polished metals are smooth with a brushed grain, windows have interior-mapped rooms, cars get clearcoat, fabric gets a sheen
lobe, flutters in the wind and glows through in the sun; water has depth, waves and shore foam.
Nature: a heightfield countryside (hills, lakes, a river, farm patchwork behind hedgerows, forests, moss-topped rocks),
procedurally grown trees and bushes built from leaf-cluster cards cut from ambientCG leaf scans,
and GPU grass — hundreds of thousands of procedural blades — all swaying in travelling gusts and thrashing when the hole passes.
Content packs: the Stage 11 models (fair, airport, railway, county fair, events, chain props, power-ups, the duck) live in
public/models/packs.json and download per city (loadPack()), behind the staged loading screen, so a run only fetches the
districts it has.
Art: ~130 models (detailed toy people with a GPU walk cycle, AAA-detailed toy cars), all procedural Blender Python scripts (blender/assets/*.py) driven through Blender MCP. One shared palette atlas + roughness/metalness atlas, so the whole city is one material; chrome, glass and gold are real metals/gloss.
Performance: every model ships 3 LODs (full, ~25%, ~8% via meshoptimizer). The city is instanced per asset per 40 m chunk and culled; far chunks drop to LOD2 and stop casting shadows.
Develop
npm install
npm run dev # game at http://localhost:5174, model showroom at /gallery.html
npm run check # size ladder: no gaps > 1.3x between edible sizes
npm run build # static site in dist/
python3 tools/textures.py # rebuild the PBR texture library in public/tex (Pillow + numpy; downloads CC0 scans)
Debug URL flags: ?webgl (WebGL2 backend), ?seed=7, ?time=golden|noon|morning|dusk|night, ?mood=seaside, ?r=6 (start radius),
?view=x,z,dist[,yaw,pitch] (fixed camera), ?start=beach (start tile), ?tide (hold the flood), ?grass=0.5 (blade density),
?q=low|medium|high, ?fps, ?nopost, ?noao, ?low, ?event=parade|marathon|carshow|ufo&eventAt=5 (force the run's event),
?mutator=lowgrav|ducks|mini|night|rush, ?abil=quake,dash,vortex (equip abilities), ?allcities, ?tone=agx,
?noshafts, ?nolut, ?off=glass,cav,jit,brush,sheen (disable new material terms), ?region (start in Phase 2; with ?r=
for the size), ?nophase2 (win at the town clear), ?noarmy, ?norivals. In the dev server, __views() takes the establishing shots (town at three sizes; on the island the coast, foothills, a village, the castle and the capital) into .shots/view-*.jpg: take them before and after any visual change, with a fixed ?seed and ?time. __perf() returns the frame-time stats behind the ?fps overlay. __snap('name') saves the graded frame to
.shots/name.jpg even when the window is in the background. test.html?mat=trees|grass|toy|ground
renders materials in isolation; node tools/shot.mjs out.png "?seed=7&webgl" captures a frame headlessly.
Rebuild art (Blender with the MCP add-on running): run blender/build_all.py inside Blender, then npm run optimize.
Playtest bot: open /?bot and run __runBot(600) in the console (__sloppy = true for a careless player), or headless:
node tools/botrun.mjs "&seed=7" 900 [1] prints the run log and the itemised dust payout.
node tools/balance.mjs "&mood=fun" 420 777,42 greedy,sloppy sweeps seeds (greedy + careless bot), tools/perf.mjs reports draw
calls and triangles, tools/probe.mjs evaluates an expression in a headless run, tools/sheet.mjs renders showroom contact sheets.
Latest balance check (docs/BALANCE.md): the greedy bot clears 7 of 12 seeds in 2:57–4:31 and sometimes dies; with abilities 8 of 12;
the careless bot mostly doesn't clear.
See PLAN.md for the build stages and ART.md for the art bible.
The last feast and the end of a world (Phase 3): at 88% of the land the Moon leaves its orbit, falls over the horizon with its cracks glowing, and breaks up at the Roche limit: nine rocks rain on you, each a ring that locks (dive into its inner circle and the rock is yours). When the last land is gone the planet is no longer a ball of land: it splits along fault lines into shards that show crust, glowing mantle and the white-orange core, the sea peels off in a stream of droplets, every chunk is stretched toward the hole (tidal spaghettification), spirals in and is swallowed — each one a pulse and a step in the hole's growth — an accretion disk builds up, and then the purple hole turns into a true black hole: a shadow, a photon ring, a Doppler-beamed disk bent over the top, the starfield lensed round it. A ~30 s sequence (skippable after the first), then a results screen (land eaten over time, time per tier, set pieces, six world stars, dust), a legacy perk for the next world, and a new planet. (?planet&r=2300000&finale plays it, __finale(t) scrubs it.)
The cosmos (Phase 4, ?space): after the world is eaten, Devour the sky starts eleven tiers: comets, dwarf worlds and the planets, then the Sun, stars and their systems, clusters and nebulae, the spiral arm, the Milky Way, the Local Group, superclusters, the universe. The hole is the finale's black hole with the sky bent by the exact Schwarzschild deflection and a thin Interstellar disk; planets and galaxies use Blender-baked patterns (art/space/); what it eats comes back out as jets that speed it up for a few seconds, and chains, comet ion rushes, meteor storms and a rival hole keep it moving. Design and numbers: docs/PHASE4.md.
Sealed: starve back toward town size (under 9 m) and the army flies a Void Lid in. Grow past 9.6 m in 14 seconds or
it drops and the run is over: a weak hole is the only kind small enough to cap. Every new run starts from a fresh town.
Challenge cards: pick one rule twist per run (Car Crusher, Rush Hour, Glass Cannon, Crowded…) for a dust multiplier.
Collection book: every type of thing gets a page the first time you swallow it. Rare golden variants are hiding.
Progress: void dust is scarce — a strong clear pays ~200 before its card multiplier, a defeat keeps half of its meal and combo dust.
It buys small upgrades (a few percent per level, most with a catch) and hole skins (Galaxy, Lava, Cotton Candy, Black Hole). Unlocking
everything takes dozens of runs.
Ten cities, unlocked in order: Old Town → Suburbia → Waterfront → County Fair → Seaside → Fun Fair → Railway Town →
Boomtown → Neon Nights → Airport City. Clear a city (or earn 2 of its stars) to open the next; the city picker shows each
one's landmark, stars and lock. Every run rolls its own size, time of day and start spot.
Districts: a fairground (ferris wheel, carousel, bumper cars, stalls, a crowd), a railway with a working train that stops at
the station while traffic waits at the level crossings (eat it car by car — the rest uncouple), an airport whose airliner is the
largest meal in the game, and a county fair of prize pumpkins, hay bales, scarecrows and tractors.
City events: one surprise per run — a parade with floats, drummers and a giant balloon, a city marathon, a car show of
spinning turntables with rare cars, or a UFO landing (eat it before it takes off).
Chain reactions: swallow a gas station and the block blows apart, a fireworks stand lights up the sky, a water tower floods
the street, falling buildings knock their neighbours over, and hydrants burst the water main.
Power-ups: capsules drop around the city — Magnet, Ghost (the city loses you), Split (a twin hole) and Surge. Rivals want them too.
Abilities: buy Quake, Vortex Burst or Dash with dust and fire them on a cooldown (Space / right-click / E, or the on-screen buttons).
Star challenges: three goals per city, 30 in all. Stars open cities and unlock four more hole skins (5 / 10 / 20 / 30 stars);
10 stars open a second ability slot.
Weekly: one city per week with a twist — Low Gravity, Everything Is Ducks, Miniature, Night Shift or Rush Hour.
Quality tiers: tablets and phones start on low (1x resolution, single-projection texture sampling, lighter AO, sparse grass, no full-detail models
downloaded) and keep the full look; desktops start on high. A watchdog sheds the least visible cost first if the frame rate drops
(resolution, AO resolution, grass, then AO and bloom). Force a tier with ?q=low|medium|high; ?fps shows a live performance overlay.
Design rules: no dead ends — nothing blocks movement, a size-ladder check (npm run check) guarantees there's always something slightly smaller to eat, and every hit is capped.
