Myth Buster
- Three worlds, three bossesEach boss is an excuse to bust
- Desktop and phonesInstalls as an app, plays offline
- Phaser 3About 3,900 lines of JavaScript
Myth Buster is a pixel-art platformer for YouthStudio, Publicis Groupe’s hub for youth culture in the Middle East. You run through three worlds firing truth bolts at the excuses that hold people back, from “just five more minutes” to “just one more video”.
It began in 2025 as part of a presentation Jennifer Fischer gave at the Athar festival in Riyadh. The room busted myths about young people on a big screen, playing along on their phones, and it went on to run in YouthStudio’s Un-Cliched Live sessions. CATS at Publicis Groupe drew the art.
In 2026 I made it a game anyone can play: the same three levels, with real controls, bosses that fight back, and everyday excuses in place of the sessions’ own myths. I designed it and built it with the help of AI.
Three worlds
About 250 to 300 tiles each, with checkpoints, a set piece, three hidden keys and a boss.
The Snoozer
“JUST FIVE MORE MINUTES”
Desert. Throws pillows, and hides behind a SNOOZING shield you have to wait out. The set piece is a sky bridge made of cushions.
The Procrastinator
“I’LL DO IT TOMORROW”
Pink-sky city. Spits LATER and TOMORROW bubbles you can shoot out of the air, and leaves sticky puddles that slow you down. Before it: a sky conveyor and a staircase that crumbles under you.
The Doomscroller
“JUST ONE MORE VIDEO”
Cave. Fires spreads of hearts and rains notifications from above. The level is a climb through the dark, with its own lighting pass.
Every boss telegraphs its attacks, and turns faster at half health. Beat it and the MYTH BUSTED card comes up with the myth struck through, set in live pixel type rather than an image.
The cast
Every character is a strip of frames on a 16-pixel grid, shown here at three or four times size.
- Hero
- Hero
- Desert
- Desert
- City
- Cave
- Cave
- The Snoozer
- The Procrastinator
- The Doomscroller
Built to be finished
Deliberately on the easy side, so anyone can reach the last boss.
- Five hearts. Checkpoints top them up.
- A double jump, with coyote time and jump buffering, so a late press still counts.
- Pits cost one heart, not a life, and put you back nearby.
- Hit in mid-air? You get your double jump back.
- Three truth keys hidden in each level, for the players who want more.
Game feel
Squash and stretch, dust, hit-stop, screen shake, a camera that looks ahead, parallax on every level, particles in the air and CRT scan lines you can switch off for a projector.
How it’s built
A static site on Cloudflare. No server, no sign-up.
- Engine
- Phaser 3 and Vite. Levels are laid out at 640 × 360, wider on long phones, and drawn at twice that.
- Levels
- Written with a small builder (flat, pit, up, plat, mover, crumble) that keeps every jump inside the reach above.
- Sharp pixels
- The canvas renders at a whole-number multiple of the base size and the browser scales it down a touch, so every art pixel stays the same size.
- Sprites
- Generated with image models from CATS’ frames, then snapped back onto a true pixel grid by a script that finds the real pixel pitch, keys out the background, cuts the palette and slices the frames.
- Terrain
- Drawn in code from palettes sampled from the original videos, so it tiles perfectly.
- Sound
- Effects synthesised with the Web Audio API. The music is the original track from the video version.
- App
- Installs to the home screen and plays offline, with install steps written for the visitor’s own phone and browser.
- Tests
- Bots drive the real game in a headless browser. One plays every level, one beats every boss, one tries about 100 jump patterns to check each key is reachable. The clips on this page were recorded the same way.
In your pocket
Held sideways: a thumb-stick on the left, A and B on the right.
Myth Buster
It keeps clear of the notch and the home bar, blocks the pinch and double-tap zoom that iOS adds to games, and plays sound even with the silent switch on.
Where it started
Athar, Riyadh, 2025.
The first version was part of Jennifer Fischer’s presentation at Athar. The room scanned a QR code and their phones turned into a single BOOST button. The big screen counted everyone who joined and played each level as a video, while the presenter told the story behind each myth.
I built it with TanStack Start and Convex, so the phones and the screen stayed in sync in real time. CATS at Publicis Groupe drew the art for the videos, and every world in the game is built from it.
- Game design and build
- Hash Milhan
- Original art
- CATS, Publicis Groupe
- For
- YouthStudio, Publicis Groupe