Zeus Stole My Wife
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Zeus Stole My Wife |
Make it stand out
You have a wife? In Ancient Greece??? Not anymore you don’t!
Picture this: you come home after a long day working the wheat fields to offer sacrifice to the Gods, but all you find is a note from your wife explaining that she has been kidnapped by Zeus.
Are we surprised? Not particularly, but how are you supposed to compete with the King of the Gods, Ruler of Skies, the Big Feta Cheese?
With a van, an AK-47, and a grudge of course.
For reals though, what is this stupid game?
Welcome to Zeus Stole My Wife, a 2-week-long game jam project under the brief “Road Trip”. Each team got a different country to work with, and my team was blessed (or, for everyone else, cursed) with Athens. I knew leading the narrative side of this project that I had to draw from my Cypriot roots for this masterpiece, and the end result is a mythology inspired boss rush/rage game that sends you on a quest to bring your wife back from the clutches of Zeus, fighting the Pantheon as you go.
Wanna skip the intro to the gods and just play the game? Click here to jump to the game page!
Meet the Gods
Poseidon - God of the Sea
Hades - God of the Underworld
Hades has a very unique part to play in ZSMW. As the brother who doesn’t really care for Zeus’ safety due to bitterness at being bumped off to the Underworld for eternity, Hades himself doesn’t attack you. In fact, his level isn’t necessarily one every player will get to, as you only fight Hades if you die to one of the other gods.
Hades sends his Shades to attack you in a horde, while your truck is perched on Charon’s ferry on the river Styx. Instead of focusing your aim to the top right of the screen, here enemies attack from all sides.
However, you only need to last a short time, as if you manage to survive the horde for long enough, one of Charon’s coins will appear behind a previously locked gate. Collecting this coin will take you back to the boss fight you were in, though dying to Hades will result in a total game over, requiring the player to go back to the start of the game.
Poseidon is the first boss you face in ZSMW, and is the slowest of the gods. He was also the last boss I designed for the game, as figuring out his signature look took a lot longer than I thought it would.
With the other gods, I knew there was going to be a joke element as, of course, this is a very silly game, and with all my other gods being humanoid it dawned on me to design Poseidon as a very cursed reverse-mermaid to link him to the sea, complete with hastily applied toupee.
His attacks consist of jets of water from above, throwing swordfish that explode into smaller fish if hit, and a rain of fish, though there is a longer gap between attacks that make him an ideal first boss.
The final boss of ZSMW is, rather expectedly, Zeus himself. Zeus is the most difficult boss in the game, as his attacks are faster than Ares, Athena or Poseidon’s.
Zeus has a lighting bolt from above attack, as well as a larger lightning bolt that breaks into smaller bolts like the previous fights, and also has a set of rotating rings of lightning that the player must maneuver through to even have a chance at shooting him.
He was also intended to have another attack style specific to him, which consisted of platforms the player would be able to jump on as lighting beams hit horizontally rather than the usual vertical beam, however time constraints made this mechanic impossible to implement in time.
Ares and Athena - Gods of War and Wisdom
Ares and Athena are the second boss fight you face in-game. They are a tag-team duo that have a similar attack style to Poseidon, however the weapons are different.
When designing these two, I tried to think of their dynamic not just as a boss fight, but as a struggle for power as they are both gods of war in their own right. With Ares, I knew immediately that I wanted him to have the classic badly spelled tattoo (which became a staple meme in my team’s discord channel), as well as covered in ichor coloured battle scars.
Athena on the other hand I wanted to keep scar free, as I felt she’d be wise enough to not jump blindly into fights like Ares. I also wanted her to be the most armour-clad, partly as a representation of her common sense for the battlefield, and partly as a chance to look into drawing accurate ancient Greek armour as best I could.
The duo were also supposed to have a unique boss dynamic, with both competing against each other to kill you, and even interrupting each other’s attacks to have a chance at you, unintentionally providing openings for the player to retaliate. This mechanic, however, was not implemented at the time due to time constraints.
Zeus - King of the Gods
Additional Gods
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Additional Gods |
Persephone - Goddess of Spring
Persephone is not a boss players would find in the main game. The idea for Persephone, as the wife of Hades, resides only in the Underworld mode of the game. However, my design of Persephone leans into texts that highlight her as more brutal in punishments compared to her husband. To follow suit, Persephone’s an
optional endless mode. In this mode, players will have to continuously face a mixture of typical boss fight mechanics and Underworld horde mechanics.
Aphrodite - Goddess of Love
Aphrodite, along with Hephaestus, is not one of the gods you face in battle. Instead, she is one of the counterparts in charge of an item shop that would have been available at the start of each round, or on harder difficulties only at the start of the game. Specifically, Aphrodite would have provided defense buffs to players…
Hephaestus - God of Fire
Contrastingly, Hephaestus’s role in the item shop was to provide players with offensive boost - extra bullets, upgrades to the gun, etc. My version of the pair contrast yet compliment each other, both in what they offer to the player and their designs. In the context of the narrative, Hephaestus is more than willing to offer weapons against the gods. Following his
mythology, being thrown from Mount Olympus as a baby is what results in his disabilities, fueling the vengeful fire within. You as the player are simply an opportunity to carry out a revenge he’s been planning for millennia. Aphrodite on the other hand, she’s here in part for the fun of it, and in part out of respect for your devotion to your wife, as she believes most mortals would be easier to sway. Decide to go through with attempting to marry Zeus, however, and you can kiss their support goodbye.
Hera - Goddess of Marriage
Hera would have been a secret boss available only if you manage to defeat Zeus. In the original game, defeating Zeus means getting your wife back and going home, however in the planned secret ending, the player would get to choose to dump their wife and attempt to marry Zeus (why not, right??) instead. However, in order to do so you need to have your marriage blessed, however Hera, accustomed to Zeus’ cheating ways, is not fold of this idea, and
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forces you to battle her for his hand in marriage. I wanted her design to be sharper and older looking than her husband, as a younger Hera didn’t really fit her vibe. Her angular features and long beak-like nose are nods to her ties to Peacocks in mythology, as is her choice of bold blue make-up and clothing. In the later stages of her fight, I thought it would be interesting if her face shifted to be more grotesque, with her powers coming through in the form of crying/bleeding ichor, both to show her injuries and to represent her anger and bitter tears at being cheated on by her husband yet again.
