Foothold

A small square, at the bottom of something very tall and a light it has no reasonable chance of reaching.

Record a run and it stays: a solid past self, frozen exactly where it stopped. Stand on the ones that fell short. The jump that came up empty turns out to be precisely the right height.

Foothold is a quiet puzzle-platformer about climbing on who you used to be.

Controls:
- Move: ← / → (or A / D)
- Jump: ↑ (or Space / W) 
- Leave a self here: R (only while standing)
- Retry: X
- Movement is keyboard-only

About this project
Foothold  bis ZeezBit Studios' first "longer" game - one mechanic, 27 short rooms, and a narrator who counts your failures and refuses to call them that. It's built on the same in-house template as our arcade games (shared scenes, game-feel, scaling, input, scoring) - the small, sharp toolkit pointed at something slower and stranger. One square, one rule: everywhere you have been is somewhere to stand.

How it's made
Built with an AI-assisted workflow. Code and art were generated programmatically with AI tools - claude code with phaser 4 skills and aseprite using pixel-mcp and then hand-directed, tuned, and tested. 

The imagining wasn't outsourced. The idea, the feeling, the story of standing on your own past, the shape of every room and what the light is for - that part is human. AI can build what you can picture; the picturing is still the work.

1. Engine - Phaser 4: Built on Phaser 4 (`phaser ^4.2.0`) with Vite + TypeScript (strict). 
2. Art - Aseprite: Sprites authored in Aseprite, built from source (aseprite/aseprite `v1.3.17.2`) driven programmatically through the pixel-mcp plugin.

A note on motion
There's screen shake, pulsing light, and a great deal of darkness. FOOTHOLD reads your OS Reduce Motion setting and automatically softens the shake - turn it on if motion bothers you.