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01 — Game concept · self-initiated · 2026
Creative
Quest.
Outrun the nonsense.
An endless runner about the creative career. You run — because you don’t get to stop — collecting the good stuff along the way: ideas, tools, contracts, an accolade, an actual break. Everything else is coming at you. Ghosting clients, scope creep, overdue invoices, “make it pop,” and burnout, which shows up at forty-five seconds and has a name.
Project
Browser game · self-initiated
Role
Concept · characters · art · build
Built with
HTML5 canvas · WebAudio· claude ai
Cast
Shené · The Boss · Sketch
Year
2026
Shené
The Boss
Sketch
Three creatives. One very long Tuesday.
Animation test — 24fps loop
Collect
✶
Dodge
✶
Survive
✶
Run it back
✶
Collect
✶
Dodge
✶
Survive
✶
Run it back
✶
02 — Project overview
Everyone in this industry has the same five stories. The client who disappears for three weeks and comes back with “just one tiny change.” The invoice that’s forty days past Net-30. The Tuesday you’re too fried to open the file.
Creative Quest turns all of it into something
you can jump over.
It’s a full browser game — no install, no login, playable in about four seconds from a cold tab. Three characters, hand-illustrated and extracted to sprite sheets, an eight-frame run cycle each, a difficulty ramp that never quite lets up, and a boss fight against burnout itself.
Genre
Endless runner · browser, no install
Scope
Concept, characters, sprite art, UI, sound, code
Audience
Designers, marketers, photographers, creators and freelancers
Role
Sole author — concept through build
Status
Playable · self-initiated · 2026
03 — The challenge
How might we
Turn the worst parts of a creative career into something people want to replay?
Jokes about creative work are easy to write and hard to sustain. Put them in captions and the game is funny for one run, then it’s just a runner with worse art. The relatability had to survive attempt number twenty, which meant the comedy couldn’t live in the words.
It had to live in what your hands are doing.
So “make it pop” is a thing you physically duck under. Scope creep is the one obstacle too wide to clear unless you commit. And rest doesn’t score points — it just quietly absorbs one hit, which is exactly what a day off does.
03
Playable characters
08
Frames per run cycle
45
Seconds before the Beast
✶
04 — The big idea
Outrun
the nonsense.
The creative career already is an endless runner. You don’t get to stop, the pace keeps increasing, and the obstacles are the same handful of things wearing different logos. The game just makes it literal — and hands you a jump button, which is more than the job does.
Ideas
Tools
Accolades
Rest
Ghosting
Scope creep
Net-30
Burnout
05 — The cast
Pick the creative you’re having today.
Three playable characters, each with their own stat spread, so the same run feels different depending on who you send out.
Swap with ←/→ before a run, or press C after one.
Three characters · swap anytime
Creative Lead
Shené
The all-rounder. Highest creativity and leadership on the sheet with balanced speed and jump, so she’s the one to learn the game on. Runs with the ideas tablet under one arm and the CREATE patch on her shoulder.
Speed
Jump
Agility
Creativity
Leadership
Senior Art Director
The Boss
Top speed, maximum leadership, worst agility on the roster. He has seen every version of this brief before and he is not worried — he just can’t duck as fast as he used to. Carries the brief and a fan of Pantone chips.
Speed
Jump
Agility
Creativity
Leadership
Creative Intern
Sketch
Best jump, highest agility, still working on everything else. Clears scope creep like it’s nothing and runs on Focus Fuel and pure optimism. Sketchbook in the bag, INTERN badge still on the lanyard.
Speed
Jump
Agility
Creativity
Leadership
06 — Character sheets
Draw it once, properly, then build.
Each character got a full production sheet before a single line of game code: hero pose, eight-frame run cycle, four-view turnaround, expression set, motion notes, stat spread, palette and power-ups. It’s more work up front and it saves all of it later — every sprite in the build is extracted straight off these.
Hero pose · run cycle · turnaround · expressions · stats
07 — Run cycle
Eight frames, looped forever.
Contact, down, passing, up — twice, then back to one. The sprite below is the real strip cut from Shené’s sheet, running at the same rate the game does. Change the speed and you’re watching the difficulty ramp.
Contact · down · passing · up
Warm-up
Run — 330 px/s
Sprint — 720 px/s
Freeze
01
Bounce & timing
A subtle rise and fall through the cycle. Without it the character skates; with it, they have weight. It’s the single change that makes a run read as a run.
02
Arm swing
Opposite arm to leg, always. It’s the counterbalance that keeps the figure from looking like it’s falling forward and it’s the first thing that breaks when you drop frames.
03
Leg overlap
On the passing pose the back leg extends past the front and follows through. That overlap is what sells speed at eight frames instead of twenty-four.
08 — Collect & avoid
Everything on this list has happened to you.
The whole item economy is one long inside joke, but it’s a working one — every pickup and obstacle does something mechanically different, so the joke keeps landing on run twenty.
8 pickups · 5 obstacles
Collect
Pen
+50
The most basic unit of progress. Everywhere, worth grabbing, never enough on its own.
Palette
+50
Colour choices, banked. Pairs with the pen for a steady baseline score.
Accolade
+200 · ×2
The big one. Doubles your score for a stretch, which is roughly how an award actually feels.
Rest
absorbs one hit
Scores nothing at all. Just quietly takes the next hit for you — the most honest mechanic in the game.
Coffee / tea
+50
Fuel. No special powers, and anyone who has worked a deadline knows why it’s in here anyway.
Hydrate
+50
The one everybody skips. Also a weapon against the Beast, which is not an accident.
Contract
+50
Signed scope, in writing. Your best defence against the obstacle two rows down.
Delegate
+50
Hand it off. Hardest skill in the industry, cheapest pickup in the game.
Avoid
Overdue invoice
jump
“Flattened by an overdue invoice.” — “Net-30” was a lie. It always is.
Burnout
jump
“Burnout caught up with you.” — Even visionaries need to log off.
Unresponsive client
jump
“Ghosted mid-project.” — The client will “circle back”… never.
“Make it pop”
duck
“‘Make it pop’ — fatal.” — The three deadliest words in design. Comes in high; you have to go low.
Scope creep
big jump
“Swallowed by scope creep.” — “Just one more tiny change…” ×47. Wide enough that you have to commit to clearing it.
Every death screen writes its own line. Dying is meant to be a little bit funny — that’s what makes you press space again.
09 — The boss fight
At forty-five seconds, the lights go down.
Survive three quarters of a minute and the whole world shifts to night. The Burnout Beast arrives and starts throwing the things clients actually say — you dodge the demands, collect the boosts, and strike back. Beat it and it comes back sooner next time, because of course it does.
Night mode · recurring boss
“It should only take 5 minutes.”
“We don’t have budget.”
“Can we see 20 more versions?”
“Can you work this weekend?”
Strike back with —
Rest
Delegate
Coffee
Contract
Hydrate
10 — Play the build
It’s not a mockup. It runs.
The full game, embedded below. Space or tap to start, and survive forty-five seconds to meet the Beast. Best score persists for the session.
Playable · keyboard + touch
Jump
Space / ↑ / tap
Duck
↓ / hold duck
Pick your creative
← → or 1 · 2 · 3
Switch after a run
C
Sound
♪ toggle, top left
11 — Build notes
Illustrated it, then shipped it.
One file, no engine, no framework. Everything below is a decision that had to be made twice — once as a drawing and once as code.
Canvas · sprites · WebAudio
01 — Sprites
Hand-illustrated, then extracted
Every pose starts on the character sheet and gets cut into a sprite sheet by hand — run frames, jump, slide, plus the whole item set. Sprites are embedded directly in the file as WebP, so the game has zero external requests and works from a USB stick.
02 — Motion
Eight frames beats twenty-four here
A tighter loop reads better at speed and keeps the file small enough to load instantly. The three motion notes on the sheets — bounce, arm swing, leg overlap — are the whole animation spec, and they’re what the eight frames are spent on.
03 — Difficulty
330 to 720, and never a plateau
Speed climbs from 330 to 720 pixels per second while spawn gaps tighten alongside it, so the run gets harder in two directions at once. The Beast arrives at forty-five seconds and returns sooner every time you put it down.
04 — Sound & feel
WebAudio, screen shake, and a night that falls
Music is generated through WebAudio with a single mute toggle. The page itself transitions to night when the boss appears — the background of the document, not just the canvas — so the whole browser window dims with you.
#F5C400
Quest yellow
#0F47AF
Director blue
#137A3B
Intern green
#F57C00
Deadline orange
#FF5D5D
Panic coral
#221A2E
Studio ink
#FBF3E4
Paper cream
Designed it, drew it, and built it.
Creative Quest is a self-initiated browser game — concept, three characters, full production sheets, sprite extraction, interface, sound and the code underneath it. If your next project needs someone who can take an idea from a blank page all the way to something people can actually use, this is the range.
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