Radical Sisyphus
Radical Sisyphus
Programmer / Game Designer / 2D Pixel Artist / Voice Actor
Radical Sisyphus is an endless runner (loosely based on the Greek myth of Sisyphus with an added radical 90's cartoon-y flair) where you can attack enemies with a massive boulder.
The game's initial concept stemmed from the idea of making an endless runner about the Sisyphus myth being really funny, since it's about Zeus forcing Sisyphus to endlessly push a boulder up a hill as punishment. I also wanted to take advantage of Sisyphus's boulder as a weapon in combat and tying that into the gameplay loop of avoiding obstacles until you fail, having to take both the player and the boulder into consideration.
I designed a simple combat mechanic where the player can launch the boulder in front of their character to attack enemies for additional points. If the boulder hits an enemy (or the top of the screen), the boulder promptly and safely rolls back towards the player. If it hits an obstacle, it's game over. There's a bit of risk to this mechanic because once you launch the boulder, you can't move the player character until the boulder finishes rolling back to the player (which happens pretty quickly to maintain the fast pace of gameplay). If you try to hit an enemy and miss, the boulder could hit an obstacle (causing a game over) before it reaches the top of the screen and safely rolls back.
I'm really happy with how this game came out. I feel like I captured the fun absurdity of the concept quite well and the boulder combat adds a little bit of depth to the simple but fun endless runner game loop. I coded this game in Javascript using the Phaser framework, and it was my first time coding a non-tutorial game in that framework. I had a bit of trouble learning and working with the physics collider system to have it handle boulder collision with individual enemies in the enemy group, but I managed to overcome that hurdle and became much more familiar with Phaser's physics system.