This was originally going to be a little gag about the name "Pixel Day" looking similar to "Pico Day" (so the star should be a pixel!) back when it didn't look like anything too serious on the NG calendar - just a link to past Pixel Day submissions with no announcement post. Then the big announcement came and I was all "oh snap what've I gotten into this is srs bizniz..." and tried to get this real. It's not the 80s/90s retro that the event organizers had in mind but hopefully it's fun without losing the original feeling it had when it was just going to be a little gag.
One hand for mouse and one for keyboard (WASD or NumPad)
- Move: A / D, NumPad 4 / 6, Arrows left / right
- Jump: Space, NumPad 0 or Ins
- Restart: R
- Pause (and level select): P
- Fullscreen: F
- Mute music: M
- Unlockable ability: Mouse (invert by pressing I)
- Adjust mouse sensitivity: J (increase) or K (decrease) keep tapping them a bunch
- Unlockable ability: W / S, NumPad 8 / 2, Arrows up / down
- Unlockable ability: C, NumPad . or Del
- Unlockable ability: X, NumPad +
- Unlockable ability: Left mouse button
*** FIREFOX USERS ***
When I was testing in Firefox I found that if the mouse is captured then it makes the screen rotate even if the mouse is still. That issue went away if I changed the browser zoom to not be 100% (even just changing it to either 90% or 110% or going fullscreen fixed it) and it doesn't happen with other browsers so seems like a weirdness of Firefox itself. It hasn't happened to everyone so maybe my computer's just janked but if it happens to you try changing the browser's zoom.
@ GameDevs
For the loading screen I made a shader which uses your GPU, not CPU, and here's how (familiarity with basic C required) so you can quit boring me to death watching your loading bars creep up. Shaders can do much neater things than the simple pixels I went for...