@hamptonism tweeted that Sisyphus would be happier with a number that goes up on every push and stickers to put on the rock. So I made it.
A tweet by @hamptonism
Sisyphus Must Be Happy is a mobile idle clicker. You tap to push a boulder uphill and earn Effort. You spend Effort in a shop of junk (stickers, v-bucks, battle passes, NFTs), and each item gives a permanent Effort multiplier.
The game world is drawn as ancient Greek black-figure vase painting; the shop items are photorealistic product shots.
Stickers you buy get stuck to the boulder and roll with it, like the tweet asked for.
Making the art
I wrote Gemini image-generation scripts and iterated on the prompts until I had both the game sprites and the interface parts I wanted: the modal, navbar, top bar, buttons. Then I cleaned each generation up in Photoshop into flat plates, which the game slices and positions. It was the first time I built a whole interface this way.
Balancing the economy
The economy math is all pure functions, so I can test it directly. One test file pins the upgrade cost curves, how the Effort multipliers stack, and how the hill lengthens each climb. Reading those numbers out of the tests is how I tuned the early ramp and the endgame scaling, where the values get large enough to run past normal floating-point precision.
A late-game boulder, with every item bought:
Links
Live at sisyphus-must-be-happy.pages.dev, code on Github.