About Groggy Roads

The idea

Road-crossing hoppers usually star an animal with good reflexes. We wondered what the genre would feel like if the hero were the least qualified pedestrian alive: a man who has been nursing the same bottle since Tuesday, standing at a kerb, forming a plan.

That one joke produced the rest of the game. If your character is unsteady, then the pickups should not just add points, they should get in the way, so the four vices sway the camera, speed the world up, slow it down, or melt the colours for a few seconds. If a night out is the theme, then the traffic should be the things you would actually meet: in the suburbs where Gary lives, every vehicle is healthy food he is avoiding, from a rogue carrot to an emotional eggplant, with the milk truck as the only licensed driver on the road.

And once one world existed, the roster had to work the same way. There are eight characters, and each brings an entire world rather than a new hat: their own traffic, their own express train, their own thing to float on, their own renamed pickups and their own bird waiting for them to stand still. The Freshman gets the campus and a goose with a grudge. Nana gets the retirement village, a bingo cage in the fast lane and a crow. The Beast gets the iron paradise and a pigeon that lifts more than you do.

How it is made

The game is voxel art built in code with Three.js. Every character, vehicle and predator is assembled from boxes by a small script rather than modelled in an editor, which is why the whole thing loads in one go and why a new world is mostly a list of shapes and jokes.

The road ahead is generated as you go. Lanes are chosen and recycled a few rows outside the camera, so a run is endless and no two are laid out alike, and the difficulty climbs steadily rather than in steps. It ships as a single self-contained page: no launcher, no install, no account, no sign-in and no server that has to be up. Your best score, your stash and your unlocked characters live in your browser's own storage on your device, which means they are yours, they are private, and clearing your browser data clears them. The privacy policy explains the rest, including how ads will work in the mobile apps.

It is free, it works on phones and on desktops, and it needs nothing but a modern browser with WebGL.

Where it is going

Honestly, in this order, with no promised dates:

• Now: the browser version at groggyroads.com/play, which is the complete game.
• Next: an Android beta, the same game packaged for the phone.
• Later: iOS, once Android has been out long enough to have taught us something.

New regulars and new worlds are the most likely thing to arrive after that, because they are the part of the game that is most fun to build.

The small print

Groggy Roads is a parody for adults, with cartoon depictions of drink and drugs, and it is rated 18+. It is not an endorsement of anything. If you arrived here looking for something comparable, there is a longer piece on games like Crossy Road and where this one fits.

Groggy Roads is an independent game and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Crossy Road or Hipster Whale. All trademarks belong to their respective owners.

Contact

Bugs, ideas, a screenshot of a run that should not have been survivable: contact@groggyroads.com. Data questions go to the privacy policy first, which is shorter than most and says less because there is less to say.