fun idea! love the story of sisyphus. would love to see a bit easier start to really get into the game before the difficulty ratchets up. found myself standing still a lot waiting for the number of hazards to finish

Great game! After a lot of retries I somehow found a sweetspot where no hazards would generate in time to hurt me, I could look away from my screen while holding spacebar to get to 10000 ft ^^

The graphics are awesome! I somehow am a sucker for dithering, and your game is full of it! I see that you used SDL, that is a rare breed here on LD. I could not help myself to look into the assets folder (I was curious how you did the mountain paralax effect, looks like a circular motion, so I was expecting a big image with mountains on a sphere, but you used a sinewave I think?) There are some images that didn't make it into the final version, or am I wrong?

Great game, loved it :-)

@bhughes @wouter52 Glad you two enjoyed it! We just pushed a bugfix to the RNG - the levels should make more sense now :sweat_smile: If you have a chance to try it again, let us know what you think!

@wouter52 The parallax effect is actually deceptively simple:

* We have a single image of the mountains that is horizontally tile-able. It doesn't need to be very big. It's just a little wider than the game width.
* We tile it horizontally "infinitely" and scroll it according to the player's location. The parallax is just a matter of scrolling slower than the player is moving. We actually use the same function for both the mountain parallax and for scrolling the ground itself. The ground just has a parallax factor of 100% (whereas the mountain is 10%) but rotated a bit.

We did leave in the sprites we used as placeholders during development (the tower, bush, skull, and cube). They're actually leftover from our first Ludum Dare that we didn't finish in time :)

Brainstorming ideas, we thought about Sisyphus too. Glad to see someone took that concept all the way. Nice visuals, and punishing gameplay - as it ought to be.

I played this way long than I expected to haha. There's something to be said about a perfect blend of graphics, artwork, sounds, controls and a challenge. Makes it easy to try over and over again. Never got very far--1729--despite playing awhile. I thought I had a strategy down but it started to fall apart. It gets so chaotic up there!!!

I thought the idea was fun and fits the theme perfectly! The sound and graphics fit together very well, and the gameplay is simple yet effectively fun. I found it quite difficult to double-tap spacebar, which meant I was just getting clipped, perhaps a (slightly)faster double-tap, or smaller hitbox would do wonders here.

challenging game! A little bit frustrate when the fail comes.

I enjoyed playing through this game. The music and art were both quite good and felt very nostalgic. I also liked the animation of Sisyphus rolling down the hill with his boulder. I made it 2175 ft.

epic!

Not a bad core mechanics, this is a well-done game for one person! Good luck to you

Great adherence to the theme! The game definitely fit it. As for criticism, I found the dash not very useful, and while the slight delay before moving the boulder may have been a conscious decision, it made me confused as to whether or not I had to press or hold space to move it, so I ended up floundering for a few minutes before realizing how best to control it. Loved the overall atmosphere.

Nice idea. Simple gameplay but still enjoyable. As others mentioned already the dash felt a little bit off. Maybe binding it to a different button without the double tap would make it feel better. Anyway still a nice entry. I liked the artstyle. Keep it up!

very cool gameplay loop. I think the dash can be executed faster or dont rely on double clicking, other than that, amazing game!

Very clever, very well executed. Completely charming. I really liked this one.

Nice rage-WASD game you made. Choosing this specific mythology was brilliant, a lot of style with the music and the graphics. I think that adding it feature might actually break the game that you made, but I would recommend going the route of Downwell, and unlock color palettes and different rocks. I would add some background music, and sounds to the steps to fell how much progress I'm doing.

very good game. loved the use of the theme. only gripe was the slight delay on the dash mechanic. could not get out of a jam when i wanted. great game.

Extremely well done. The myth of Sisyphus is a perfect fit for the theme. I enjoyed how you managed to capture the look and sound of a particular era of games. Honestly wouldn't be surprised to see exactly this running on an NES.

Haskell for gamedev, I'd never have imagined it heheh

The boulder animation is so smoooooooth

You should send this to Bathaniel Nandy, he likes boulders.

@bhughes @wouter52 @quite-good @mrevilguy @cookiezz @justuspan @rmrvar @artilor901z @oleg-bone @orionhart @seng @infecsean @dob @binaryprinciple @paulhocker @geraldfingburke @jamtempisto

Thank you all for the feedback & reviews! We wanted to let you know that we do plan to release a full version of the game soon (tm). It'll be published here: https://macaronidev.itch.io/boulder We will try to post development updates on itch.io as well!