Cas! the Lost Tape

'Cas! the Lost Tape' is the game my team produced for the Gobelins X Coding Factory Lost Media Game Jam. From January 5th to 9th 2026, the Game Artists of GOBELINS, alongside students from the Coding Factory, made a game in teams of 4 to 5 students.

It was a pleasure to work alongside Ernest Bruyere, Daniel Bornard-Hendrix and Nils Dargent on this project!

Development Log

The first day started with an introductory conference presented by Esteban Giner, Ali Reddane, Stephane Cugnet and Thomas Gaudy. After the teams were announced, ours started brainstorming about what a game with the theme "Lost Media" could be.

Some of the ideas we threw out there were, for example, were a 3D game where the player would be following a paper trail to an author trying to erase their work (similarly to the character Thomas Zane from Alan Wake), or a dystopia where the player would be an employee in charge of erasing all media judged bad by a government, or even the idea of a game destroying itself progressively as you walk further in it. Nils also suggested a more meta game, like an ARG starting from the itch.io page where the player would have to solve various enigmas to find different parts of the build to play the game.

Then, interrogating ourselves on what a "Lost Media" game would invoke, especially with the generally horrific aesthetic associated with the genre, we decided to go in a wildly different direction. Why not make a cute 2D platformer game, in which we'd be playing as a lost game -- incarning the media trying to be found rather than being the person looking for it?

Once this idea was agreed on by the team, we decided on a pixel art artistic direction and did the role repartition before getting to work.

Screenshots Gallery

Graphic Realisations

Level Design

This was the original level design I made for the game. As you can see, it was quite a bit longer. We had to cut it short due to time constraints at the end. The red circles are enemies, and the yellow circles are collectibles. What remains of the green stars is the golden disc you collect at the end. At the early stage of development this was conceptualised, we had the idea of adding falling ennemies (the red sikes) and destroyable collectibles (the blue squares), but we had to drop them due to the lack of time. This level design is largely inspired by games like Super Mario Bros. or Yoshi's Island.

Character Animations

Those are the character animations I realised! The character design went through a few iterations, originally a disc before trying with a cartridge and settling on a cassette. The white outline was added for mure visibility in the environment.

Spritesheets of the animations:

Tiles and environments

Those were used in the level design as platforms and obstacles. They were made at the last minute due to another member of the project not meeting the artistic direction, so I was tasked with remaking the assets. The less saturated planks were supposed to be used in the parallax backgrounds, but ultimately weren't needed.

This is the main collectible. This design was originally considered for the main character, to have it roll around, but it was scrapped in favour of Cas. I used it to practice getting back into animating on Aseprite, and we decided to incorporate it in the game.