The theme of the next CoLab series was about the Odyssey. The team at CoLab didn't have any specifications other than needing a collaborative game that could fit with the rest of the curriculum. I found a few ideas from a doc and one of them was for a game about escaping the cyclops, Polyphemus. This felt intriguing to me so I tried to flesh it out further.

After completing Abu Simbel, I had a better grasp on my tools for designing and developing these games. The constraints of the Colyseus backend as well as the quirks of Construct 3 helped me plan for Polyphemus. I aimed for simplicity but implementing a Cyclops AI for multiplayer would prove far more complicated than I had anticipated.

The goal of the game was to gather drachma (points) and to find sheep to escape the cave.

In the epic poem, the soldiers hung underneath sheep to escape the cave of blind Polyphemus. In the game, 2-3 cyclopes chase after the highest scoring player. If a cyclops collides with a player, that player would lose half their score and be paralyzed for the rest of the turn.

Adding the cyclops became a serious obstacle. After review with the CTO, I was faced with the fact that how I had designed it was problematic for synchronized states across different clients. Because the server dictates all of the state, there was no easy way to implement pathfinding unless I wanted to go back, hardcode the maps to the server, add algorithms for avoiding obstacles and finding the shortest path to a player. Doable. But probably not worth it for a game that would only be played for a couple of weeks.

My hacky solution around it was to make it so that only one player was ever updating the state of the cyclopes and the sheep. This became part of the game design as well. I made it so that only one player could move at a time, which is quite the gamble. My hope was to make it so that players had to intentionally share control and speak up for when they needed to move because a hungry cyclops was inching towards them.

It worked for the time being. So I added a few other mechanics to fill it out a bit more. I added 3 different maps to play, webs to trap players, a collectible that could turn sheep and cyclopes to stone, and a secret level to reward players if they successfully gathered sheep for each player.

I completed the game in 2024 and even though I had more experience from Abu Simbel it still proved to be very challenging. The process takes quite a bit of time and I usually don't get a many chances to test any prototypes. For the next game, my goal was to continue simplifying my design and focus in on fun while staying within constraints. I also want to design with more playtest feedback so that the game can maybe have a longer lifespan. As proud as I am of these first two games, they have considerable design flaws that shorten their lifespans.