Duskyard: 2D Pixel Platformer

Duskyard is a 2D pixel platformer where the hero has your face. Take a photo of your own face, or pick one you already have. It becomes a 32x32 pixel sprite on your iPhone, and that sprite is the hero of a small retro side scroller — fully offline, with no ads. Your photo becomes your game character — a tiny pixel drawing made on this iPhone. The photo itself is never saved, never uploaded and never leaves your device. FOUR CONTROLS, NO JOYSTICK Left, right, jump and duck — four fixed buttons, two under each thumb. Your character only moves when you move it. Hold jump for a higher one, tap again in mid-air for a second jump, and duck to slip under a low ceiling or drop faster. There is no virtual joystick and nothing floating over the level. FOUR HAND-BUILT LEVELS IN THE DUSK YARD This first release is a short game: four levels, placed by hand, under a dusk sky. Going back to the left is always allowed. PRECISION, NOT COMBAT There are no enemies and there is nothing to fight. The difficulty is the jump itself: the gap you almost cleared, the ledge you misjudged. PIXELS ON PURPOSE Chunky 8-bit tiles under a night sky. Your sprite is reduced to 32x32 and a handful of colours, so the hero looks like it was drawn for the game rather than pasted into it. PLAYS ON A PLANE Duskyard is offline, all of it. No wifi, no signal, no account, no sign-in. There is no networking code in the app at all — no analytics, no crash reporter, no third-party SDKs. NOTHING TO BUY No in-app purchases. No subscription. No ads. ABOUT YOUR PHOTO Duskyard uses no face detection and no landmarks — it crops your picture to an oval, cuts you out of the background on your iPhone, shrinks it to 32 pixels square and reduces it to a handful of colours. That drawing is the only thing that is kept. The photograph itself is never written to disk and there is nothing in the app that could send it anywhere.