Portal Panic

Controls 

• Arrow keys: Move
• Z: Jump
• X: Clear dialogue, pull levers

Don't Panic!

You've been captured by your local Wizard. Again. But while that might be a problem for an ordinary frog, you are Froginald P. Toad, and you won't give up so easily. Time to escape the Wizard's tower and get back home in time for tea!

To exit each level you need to open a portal.

To do this, touch each of the Wizard's magic runes and connect them together in a loop. When you connect the final rune to the first one you touched, you'll be transported onwards!

But be careful: the Wizard's tower is full of dangers. And whenever you connect two runes together you unleash powerful magic energy that is fatal to the touch! 

About the Game

This game was inspired by graph theory problems - making a loop by connecting nodes together. One of the most famous examples of this is the Konigsberg Bridge Problem (the PICO-8 file was called konig.p8). It was also inspired by games like Celeste, Spelunky and N++. 

The original idea for the game involved many different kinds of node that did different things, but once I started making the simple laserbeam node I realised even that was a lot to play around with, so I ditched the others for the jam. The game is also a lot harder than it probably should be - I was playing a lot of Celeste and thinking about speedrunning and it possibly made me tweak things a bit too hard  😅

I made the game in about 18 hours, solo. I never, ever do full-pace jams any more, even if it means getting less done, but GMTK's five-day length means this still lets me make something quite solid! It's also thanks to Adam Saltsman and PICO-8 that I've felt able to make things so fast again too. Portal Panic also owes thanks to Celeste Classic's source code for some utility functions and guidance, and a few BBS threads for things like efficient intersection checking.

I hope you enjoy playing it! I have a post-jam version planned with a timer, death counter, and some of the extras I didn't get to add (more levels, smoother progression, more music and art).