Games Autumn 2024
by Matthew Lyon  • 

Prism Escape

Prism Escape is a chaotic collect-and-dodge action game where you try to steer with your pointing device while dealing with inertia. It was created in Fennel over ten days for the 2024 Autumn Lisp Game Jam, you can check out the source code. The game was my idea, and I again worked with my friend Phil, who worked on enemy logic and various mechanics, while I worked on the physics, controls, a particle-heavy procedural graphics system, and sound effects. It is built for the TIC 80 fantasy computer, which has some rather severe limitations.

Screenshot of the game

Collect the triangular gems, while avoiding spiky mines and enemies.

Inspired by Crystal Quest and Ikaruga, the game is built around two fundamental concepts:

  • Inspired by Crystal Quest, You move with your mouse/trackball/trackpad, but your movements create inertia. Move too suddenly and you’ll have to provide equal, opposite reactions to get back under control. Enemies spawn from the side gates, and you have to collect all the “gems” in order to open the gate at the bottom of the screen and move to the next level.

  • Inspired by Ikaruga, you can only interact with gems, mines, and enemies which are the same color as your ship. Where Ikaruga only had Black & White and you pressed a button to switch between them, Prism Escape has red, purple, blue, cyan, green, and yellow, and you can switch to a neighboring color through the circular portal for that color.

Screenshot of the game

The enemies will hunt you down through the portals, becoming the necessary color to kill you. They’re pretty good at it.

This was a lot of fun to work on. I have fond memories of Crystal Quest and while I’m not a fan of Bullet Hell, the color-shifting mechanic added another layer to the gameplay which I think changed the formula up enough to make it more approachable.

One challenge in particular was figuring how to differentiate the things you could immediately interact with versus the things in a different color which you couldn’t interact with; you might notice the difference in coloring in the screenshots: items you couldn’t interact with had some coloring but were mostly gray, whereas the things you could interact with had a lot of coloring.

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