itch.io

Thanks so much for giving me the honor of being the first jam entry played on stream!

I am really thankful you played all the way through, and I am so impressed that you beat the boss with only 4/10 upgrades! I am going to put a warning in after the jam as you approach the boss if you are under leveled. As always, what playtesters miss real players will find immediately!

I hope you have time, after you’ve got through the other entries, to see if you can find any of the other secrets. Still no one has found the secret ending…

Thanks so much!

Congrats on finding 6/10 upgrades and 1/2 endings! (I’m guessing, if you managed to do 5/10 upgrades and 2/2 endings I’ll be very impressed!)

That dead pixel was mostly to annoy my GF. I thought it fit into the themes of the game.

How do you know if there is or isn’t breakdancing when you didn’t find all the secrets, hmmm?

Lastly, would you believe me that last year I DID implement input queueing but actually removed it because it honestly made the game feel less responsive to me. What Zero Atmospheres and Raygun do is queue one input, but if you change your mind, it overrides that queue. If you’re in a fire fight, and you press “Strafe Left” the immediately “Shoot” then you will get your shoot queued and will fire as soon as you finish strafing. BUT if you press “Strafe left”, immediately press “Shoot”, but then half a second later realize strafing puts you in harms way and press “Strafe Right” to me it feels better to have the shoot be dropped to respect your latest input as fast as possible? …I guess next year I’ll put it as an option in the settings menu since people always ask about it….

Thanks for your kind words! Better to leave them wanting more then leave them bored! Luckily for you, if you’ve not played it already, my entry from last year (https://kaisalmon.itch.io/zero-atmospheres-dungeon-crawler-jam-2025) is similar in a lot of ways. If you enjoyed this then I hope you’ll enjoy Zero Atmospheres too! (But maybe play the entries in this years jam first!!)

Hi Sloth, thanks for the kind words!

I think the boss is very hard if you don’t have enough power-ups! During playtesting the players seemed to have an easy time at it, but when I saw @captaincoder ‘s playthrough they found a route where they only acquired 4/10 upgrades. After the jam I will add a warning before the final corridor that says “Woah, you’re underlevel’d AF, go back and find more upgrades” (Maybe in a more lore-friendly tone!)

I used this skybox in my gamejam entry Captain Raygun on Planet X.

The skybox works so well, and it took such a long time to find a a skybox which was stylized AND could be rotated 360 degrees!

I loved these so much I used them in another game! https://kaisalmon.itch.io/captain-raygun-on-planet-x

Siiick!

Dm sent!

I’m not saying I will, but hypothetically how much would you charge to commission/sponsor a 5th 32x32 pixelart texture pack? Perhaps with a post-apocalyptic/wasteland theme?

Assuming you could retain the rights to sell it on here (I have no idea how popular & lucrative your packs are, but I love them so I’d like to imagine very!)

As a representative of Apple Inc. I must demand you take this shader down immediately. (Jokes aside, this looks sick, good job)

Are there any videos or gifs? (Sorry if i’m missing something obvious!)

I don’t think the thought bubbles are working for me, it just says 0 for everyone? I think?

I used these in my PICO-8 card roguelike, Demons of the Great Beyond. I love the set, so expressive and so evocative!

Had I more time in the jam I would have added some diagetic maps on the walls (got that in my back pocket for future jams), but in my view the navigation is really one of very few pieces of actual “gameplay”, which would wash away if there was a minimap!

Thanks so much for playing, hope you had a fun time!

Thank you, you’re very kind!

RetroTechFun stumbled upon this game when playing some Pico8 titles, and humiliatingly triggered a soft-lock. I’ve fixed the softlock, introduced softlock detection (dying twice within 0.1 second will now cause you to warp back to the start – consider this a valid speedrun tech if you can get it to work!)

I’ve also removed some spikes on the second screen because they are a holdover from an early vision, and is not appropriate for the direction the game ended up taking.

Hi, these pages are 404’ing for me

This happened to me to! My first black cat scratch card had two black cats and I guess that it’s gameover for me! Had fun while it lasted, though, good luck!

Seven over par, I’ll take it!

I used to be a professional escape room designer, so that makes sense!

We knew it’d happen to someone, sorry it was you! Glad you like the visuals!

I’m very pleased for you both

✨magic✨

Thanks @ayyspoon! I’m very proud of that transition, I think it explains the “plot” of the game so clearly and so efficiently, without a single word needing to be said!

@andreyslmv really knocked it out of the park with the music and sound design!

In a post processing shader, I have a set list of colors, and then for every pixel i cycle through every pair of colors (including 2 of the same) within some tolerence of similarity to that pixel. Whichever average of the 2 colors is closest – with the 2 colors being equal getting a boost – is chosen, and a simple checkerboard pattern of the colors is used. By checkerboard i mean color A if (x is even xor y is even), and B otherwise. The color list is here: https://lospec.com/palette-list/hidden-library

You know what, @khosthos, you just ooze niceness too! Thanks for the kind words!

What a fun idea! I had a blast, although I wasn’t very good at it! I do wish that the expanding arm was more relevant inside the kitchen – it’s such a fun idea, I just wished it was used for everything, you know?

I found the controls a bit confusing, especially because you expect the arm to be more relevant. I also found that the arm extending has no acceleration or deceleration made it harder to control then felt “fair”, especially when the targets are so far away. This means that really you’re just looking at the red x, rather than whole scene.

I also really liked the textures of the buildings!

The bug designs are really the star of the show, they’re just delightful! I really like the idea of building the web, but in the end it didn’t feel like I had many choices, since it’s completely random where the bugs go, the only strategy is to fill the screen with lines and then hammers spacebar until you have caught all the bugs. I think you’ve built a really interesting foundation to add different mechanics on top of.

Really really cute, great job!

The trophy at the end was a really nice tough. Simple but addictive gameplay, and who doesn’t like to see big number go up?

On my machine it did start getting laggy when the number got very big, which meant it felt slower to click (and face lag) than just wait. The sound design was great, and the visual design was well executed.

A jammer has learnt an important lesson about time management. We’ve all been there

Must play game for any PICO-8 fans!

Thanks @jumpoy! Glad you enjoyed it

1 bit spites

looks inside

2 bit sprites

Jokes aside these are great, thanks!

Thanks for your kind words! I tried very hard to make sure each area felt and looked unique – I think you were even helping me on Discord when we were discussing ways to achieve exactly that for one the of the rooms!

You don’t happen to still have that map to hand, do you?

Ooooh, I didn’t know LOWREZJAM was a thing. I’ll be joining that for sure!

The spacesuit bit was very intentional – there’s a magic tile which kills you if you’re suitless. This was intended partially as an homage to Outer Wilds, where new players often will forget to put on their suit and step out into deep space, to predictably fatal results. But it is also there to reinforce how dangerous the lack of oxygen is and make it clear that a lack of oxygen is the “enemy” of the game. This happening at the very start of the game is vital, so players only lose a few dozen seconds of progress (plus slow loading times, in fairness).

The chicken is super valid, and will probably be fixed in the first post-jam build.

Thanks for you kind words.

I know that bug: it is fixed in the newest build! But, alas, I can’t upgrade the submission! I’ll update it as soon as the jam is over!

Thanks for the kind words

Thank you! One my my playtesters gave up because they died in the final room – and hadn’t saved! That’s when I decided Autosaving was a must.

I went the manual saving route first, because I wasn’t sure I was able to ensure that no softlocks were possible – but in the end I was forced by playtesters to eliminate them on by one anyway so we got to a place where autosaves were safe!

Thanks for your kind words!

You can read more about how I scoped the project here, if you’re interested: https://kaisalmon.itch.io/zero-atmospheres-dungeon-crawler-jam-2025/devlog/933418/zero-atmospheres-a-postmortem

“found the chicken – NEXT!” 🤣