Try it live Description
Bungo Kart is an item-racing game that turns six iconic characters from Japanese literary classics into playable racers, on a track that runs straight through the world of the books. It is made for anyone who once dreaded their literature homework.
The roster:
- K from Kokoro
- Kazuko from Dazai's The Setting Sun
- Kandata from Akutagawa's The Spider's Thread
- The unnamed Cat from I Am a Cat
- Professor Wakabayashi from Dogura Magura
- Yozo from No Longer Human
The course is one continuous point-to-point race through five zones, each built to evoke a scene from its source: Ueno Park (Kokoro), the Maruzen bookstore (Lemon), Kushami-sensei's garden (I Am a Cat), the asylum (No Longer Human) and the lotus pond of Paradise (The Spider's Thread).
Items include a thrown novel, a sake bottle that sends rivals stumbling drunk, a trailing "novel shield" you can keep behind you to block an incoming hit or release, and a rare Spider's Thread that only appears when you're dead last. It teleports you to just behind first place, a nod to the story's own thread out of hell. A precision start-dash rewards hitting the countdown at exactly the right moment.
The game was built from scratch during the event in Three.js, with Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant) as a pair programmer, writing and iterating the code over many rounds of playtesting and revision. The character and kart models were generated with Tripo from reference art, then optimized, retextured and run through a custom procedural posing system, so a T-posed model could sit, steer and hold items mid-race.
How Tripo was used
Every 3D asset in the game comes from Tripo. Nothing was modeled by hand; Tripo's output is the starting point of the whole production pipeline.
- Six racers and their karts: all generated with Tripo from 2D reference images the team drew themselves.
- From static meshes to racers: Tripo's models come out in a T-pose. A bone-free procedural posing script, run through Claude, bends them into a seated driving stance and turns the static meshes into racers that can move.
