KERNEL PANIC

HACKED is a 5-level pixel platformer where the bugs are the game. Clip through walls, overflow your inventory, and corrupt reality itself — the only way to win is to exploit the engine

Comment

Inspiration

Most game jams challenge you to make a good game. This one asked us to make a broken one. We were inspired by speedrunning culture — the idea that bugs aren't flaws, they're hidden mechanics waiting to be discovered. What if the entire game was designed around that?

What it does

HACKED is a 5-level mobile-first pixel platformer where exploiting bugs is the only way to progress. Each level teaches you a different glitch mechanic: corner-clip through cracked walls, overflow a 3-bit inventory to unlock a gate, time flicker platforms that phase in and out, and toggle visual corruption mid-air to walk on invisible platforms. You can't win by playing it straight.

How we built it

Pure vanilla JavaScript and Canvas API — no libraries, no assets, no build tools. Everything is procedural: the pixel art, the sound effects (Web Audio API oscillators), the font (a hand-coded 3×5 bitmap). The game runs at 320×180 internal resolution scaled up with pixelated rendering, and is fully playable on mobile with touch controls and haptic feedback.

Challenges we ran into

Making intentional bugs feel like bugs without being unfair was the hardest part. The corner-clip mechanic had to be finely tuned — too easy and it's trivial, too strict and it's impossible. Balancing mobile touch controls on a tiny canvas without covering the game was also tricky. Getting the flicker platforms to sync between physics and rendering took more debugging than expected.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Shipping a complete, 5-level game with zero dependencies in a single weekend. The procedural audio system — every sound is a raw oscillator, no samples. The fact that the "glitch" aesthetic is entirely code: scanlines, RGB shift, screen shake, and corruption effects are all canvas math.

What we learned

Designing around limitations is more creative than designing without them. A 3-bit integer wrapping to zero feels genuinely satisfying as a puzzle mechanic. We also learned that mobile-first game design is a completely different discipline from desktop — thumb reach zones, haptic feedback, and control overlap all matter.

What's next for KERNEL PANIC

  • More levels with new glitch mechanics (memory address jumping, frame-perfect inputs)
  • A speedrun timer and leaderboard
  • Level editor so players can design their own broken levels
  • Proper save states so mobile players don't lose progress on refresh

Built With

Share this project:

Updates