Gothic Pachinko Roguelike
Ritual Ricochet
Gothic pachinko meets roguelike. Fire cursed ammo through demonic pegs and descend four acts of Hell in a browser tab.
challenge
Turn a single physics interaction into a replayable gothic roguelike.
My contribution
Solo game direction and build: physics, game systems, audio, and the desktop release.
result
A playable browser demo and a four-act campaign with five classes, daily challenges, and persistent saves.
Overview
Ritual Ricochet is built around one satisfying verb: the ricochet. Each chamber is a pachinko board of living pegs, and every shot cascades through bone, blood and cyst before landing in a moving catch bucket or feeding the Pit Maw below. Between chambers, a branching map offers bosses, shrines, shops and occult events across four escalating acts, and a sanctum turns failed runs into permanent unlocks.
Highlights
- Five covenant classes. Blood Witch, Grave Knight, Plague Doctor, Exorcist and Butcher Saint, each with a unique deck, passive and blood-fueled spell.
- Living boards. Armored bone pegs, exploding cysts, healing hearts and cursed seals make every chamber a puzzle of ricochet lines.
- Four acts, four bosses. From the Plague Crypt to the Pit Maw’s Gullet, each with its own art, music and boss.
- Relics and curses. Run-defining relics stack with hazardous curses to bend the physics of every shot.
- Daily runs, real saves. Seeded daily challenges, mid-run save and resume, gamepad support.
- Web demo, desktop full game. One codebase ships a free browser demo and a desktop build wired for Steam achievements and leaderboards.
How It’s Built
A dependency-light TypeScript codebase. Matter.js drives the peg physics and a custom canvas renderer layers lighting, trails and gore on top. Sound is a hybrid of synthesized effects and recorded stingers, so most of it works with zero audio downloads. The UI is localized across six languages with parity enforced by tests. The desktop build wraps the same client in Tauri, with a Rust backend for Steamworks.
Process
Designed and built solo, directing AI agents across game design, physics tuning, content systems, localization and the desktop release pipeline.