Arjuns creed

Inspiration

India has given the world philosophy, mathematics, and biryani. Assassin's Creed gave us parkour and hidden blades. We thought: what happens if you combine these two things, set it in a Mughal desert bazaar, and make the final boss a pompous British colonial officer who is genuinely offended by flatbread?

That was the pitch. We could not un-think it.

What it does

Arjun's Creed is a 2D pixel RPG built with the Maki framework. You play as Arjun, assassin of the Brotherhood of the Biryani, on a mission to defeat the East Masala Company.

Level 1 — The Desert Bazaar: Sneak through a Mughal market, collect chai cups for power, pick up Roti Shurikens, throw them at colonial guards (one hit KO), give rotis to Dadi to lower your Aunty Suspicion Meter, and reach the Palace Gate portal.

Level 2 — The Palace: Face The Governor in his throne room. Collect spice pickups to refill rotis, dodge his turmeric projectile barrage, and hit him 5 times to win. He delivers British quotes on every hit ("This is NOT cricket!").

The Aunty Suspicion Meter is your threat system — it rises when guards catch you and triggers game over at 100% with the message: "Every aunty in a 5km radius is now calling your mother."

How we built it

We built the game entirely in JavaScript using the Maki framework (by TialOps), which wraps Phaser 3 with a clean CLI and scene management system. We used maki new to scaffold the project and maki dev for hot-reload development.

All visuals are drawn with Phaser's Graphics API — no external sprite sheets. Every character (Arjun, guards, Dadi, The Governor) is hand-drawn using rectangles, ellipses, and circles stacked to create pixel-art human figures. The desert world, market stalls, sacred cows, oasis, palm trees, palace architecture, and sand dunes are all procedurally drawn the same way.

Game systems built from scratch:

Guard AI with patrol, alert, chase, and distracted (tiffin break) states
Roti projectile system with auto-aim toward nearest guard
Aunty Suspicion Meter that decays over time
Blend Mode that makes Arjun semi-transparent and shrinks guard detection range
Boss fight with escalating difficulty and personality

Challenges we ran into

Maki + Phaser physics: physics.add.rectangle does not exist in Phaser — we had to use add.rectangle followed by physics.add.existing, and separate visual graphics objects from invisible physics hitboxes entirely.
JavaScript array parsing: Lines like ]] followed by [[ were parsed as bracket access rather than two separate array literals, causing silent crashes. Fixed by adding semicolons.
Graphics objects and physics: Phaser Graphics objects do not support tint, setTint, or clearTint. We rebuilt all characters as separate visual + hitbox pairs.
Camera tint: camera.setTint is not available in this Phaser build. We replaced Chai Vision with a HUD flash effect instead.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A fully playable 2-level game built in one week with zero external art assets
Every single pixel drawn in code — no images, no sprite sheets
A boss fight with personality — The Governor has 5 unique hit reactions and a full death monologue
The Aunty Suspicion Meter — possibly the most culturally specific threat system in game history
Dadi randomly teleporting onto rooftops to demand rotis

What we learned

How to use the Maki framework's scene system, CLI tools, and Phaser integration
How to build a full game loop with multiple scenes, state management, and transitions in Phaser 3
That separating visual objects from physics hitboxes is the correct pattern for complex pixel-art games in Phaser
That "one roti = one KO" is deeply satisfying game design

What's next for Arjun's Creed

Real pixel art sprites replacing the graphics primitives
Level 3: Rooftop Chase across temple domes with monkey obstacles
Multiplayer co-op: Arjun and Dadi, where Dadi throws rolling pins
Sound effects and a Bollywood-inspired chiptune soundtrack
Mobile touch controls
Steam Early Access: "The East Masala Company: Deluxe Spice Edition" ## What it does