Tower Institute of Linguistics • lyonheart

Games Spring 2024

by Matthew Lyon • May 25, 2024

The Tower Institute of Linguistics is the first game I have seen to completion since building an endless runner parody featuring the Energizer Bunny in QBasic for a high school class.

Working with my friend Phil Hagelburg / technomancy over ten days for the Spring 2024 Lisp Game Jam, we put together this game for the TIC 80 fantasy computer, which has some rather severe limitations. It was Phil’s idea, and I mostly worked on the graphics, HUD, and audio, including a generative music engine which reacted to the game’s state. There is source code in Fennel, which has become my favorite lisp.

Screenshot from the game, featuring a colorful floating head on a cloud, with text beneath: Oh dear =( Have fun 'working together' when you can't talk to each other! — God isn’t too happy with that tower you’re building.

The tl;dr is “Sim Tower of Babel”, but the longer version is that you manage a bunch of refugees trying to work together to create a place to live together. This displeases God, who every so often “splits” everyone into speaking different languages. In addition to building places for food, rest, and healing, you’ll also need to build places for them to study and re-learn how to communicate with each other. If you build the tower high enough, maybe you can get your revenge.

Two workers who speak different languages are trying to communicate — Game engine limitations lent themselves to a Brutalist aesthetic.

A scarecrow sits in the field, guarding stalks of grain — Game engine limitations lent themselves to a Brutalist aesthetic.

Graphically, we talked pretty early in the pre-development phase about how to best represent the “languages” and I settled on color as the easy distinguishing factor. With six “languages” and only a 16-color palette, this left a sparse palette for the neutral architecture. It’s a sort of pixelish rendition of Brutalism.

From a user-interface perspective, this game posed a lot of challenges that were difficult to overcome with the TIC 80’s limitations: you had to manage your workers’ stamina (by providing enough beds), hunger (by providing enough places to eat), health (by building hospitals), and frustration (by building places for them to learn how to communicate with each other), and each of those required a meter for each language in use, as well as some indication as to how much of those resources were available, and which language they could service. It was a lot to try and cram in.