6 Feet Under is a challenging 2d platformer with a twist in its mechanics. Completely made in 1-bit, multiple palette options, and a banger of a soundtrack. Zombiegirl Kevin rises from her grave - help her find her way home so she can finally rest. Download for free through here.

As we hopped by streams to have people try our game, and even outside of streams, one of the most surprising responses we have gotten was regarding the name of our favorite zombiegirl: Kevin. "Wait, Kevin's a girl?" "Her name's Kevin!?", things like this. When we were brainstorming our game, the idea, the concept, the mechanics, I decided I wanted to have a derpy zombie named Kevin - I figured it'd be a suiting name that'd work for what we'd be building. At this point we didn't quite know what our character would be like, besides that it'd be a zombie. Eventually, one of our teammates kept shouting "MAKE THEM CUTER" as our artist was working on the character. Eventually it turned into the zombiegirl as we released her in our games jam game - however we did not have a name. I personally liked Kevin, and didn't care about whether it's a common name for a girl or not; I continued calling her Kevin. Eventually, one of our programmers started using the name Kevin in the code as well - to the point where our team got conditioned to call our character Kevin and that's really how her name came to be.

What surprised me though; is that people seemed to be way more surprised by the fact we have a girl named Kevin in our game, than the fact that we have a zombie turning into a drill, traveling through random floating, layered, dirt blocks. I can only assume that this is because we are conditioned to normalize unrealistic levels in video games. For example, Mario having randomly floating coin blocks. We grow up with that stuff, just as we grow up to know Kevin as a male's name. The same thing applies to our game mechanic itself; it seems. People are so used to jump or climb over obstacles, we constantly kept getting a "WOW That's cool!" response as people found out the regular "jump"-button would instead drill them down into the dirt, rather than jumping up. It's amazing to see what kind of responses we got just by giving players something different than what they're used to.

What other surprises have you ran into throughout this games jam!? Please share your experiences!

By the way; 6 Feet Under has a community discord now, we have speedrunners, a fanarts/meme section and will post potential announcements/patch notes on there! Feel free to join!