Prism Indigo v1.6 Update and 2024 Plans

Merry Christmas, and happy holidays! I come bearing gifts: a massive update for Prism Indigo, plus news of my plans for 2024!

The main outstanding criticism was that Standard difficulty was too hard, yet Prism Mode was too easy. I wanted to address this while still retaining the option to give yourself infinite lives, for accessibility and debugging purposes, and my solution is twofold.

Firstly, Prism Mode is gone. In its place, I've added an Easy difficulty, that tones down the bosses and gives you some extra lives. I can tweak it later if people still find it too difficult. Secondly, I've added a "Cheats" menu, available from the Options screen, where you can give yourself infinite lives - as Prism Mode worked before - or other game-breaking buffs. These will, however, disable achievements and high-score saving, and are disabled in Hardcore difficulty and Prism Hunter mode.

But what if you want more of a challenge? Well, the DX version has some special "Black Label" cheats, that rearrange the game to make it even harder. These don't disable achievements or high-scores, and actually boost your score multiplier when active.

Alongside these upgrades are the usual raft of bug fixes and quality-of-life changes. Full patch notes are at the bottom of the post. (I actually extensively tested this update, so there shouldn't be any further bugs for once!) And in the spirit of Christmas, I've launched another sale, so you can get the game for 30% off until January 8th.

But why such a big update, after all this time? Well, that brings me on to my plans for 2024. Obviously, I plan to finish and release Prism Warriors sometime next year, but more importantly: I plan to release both Prism Indigo and Prism Warriors on Steam. I want both games to be as presentable as possible for when that happens, and regardless of how it turns out, I want to be able to say that I have released a game on Steam. Not every dev can say that.

Aside from that, I'll be continuing to enter Ludum Dare, and over on Newgrounds I plan to try adding API integration to my old PICO-8 games (and my TIC-80 games if possible!), to allow for things like medals and global leaderboards. There's also my upcoming Toy Boy Jam entry (that I'll be rushing to finish, having taken Christmas off!), plus a couple of other projects I'd like to dredge up if I have the time and energy.

This has been an excellent year for me. Six Seats Left has become one of my most acclaimed games ever, and Fruit Fall and Deliver Us From Evil were also fairly well-received. I'm in a new apartment, I'm in a loving relationship, and in two weeks' time I'll be having my long-awaited ADHD assessment. All things considered, I'm in a much better place now than I was earlier in the year, and I'm hoping to keep that going until 2024.

Onwards and upwards!

***

V1.6 Update Notes

Additions

• New “Easy” difficulty:
  • Start with 9 lives instead of 5
  • Bosses have 25% less health
  • Bosses’ patterns are slowed by 25%
• Cheat menu:
  • “Standard cheats” make the game easier but disable achievements and high scores
  • “Black Label cheats” make the game harder but provide a score multiplier (DX version only)
• Two new achievements (DX version only)
• Confirmation popup when deleting your save data
• Audio cue if you try to fire a Burst without enough Burst Gauge charge

Changes

• Removed “Prism Mode” and replaced it with an “Infinite Lives” cheat (existing Prism Mode high scores can still be viewed)
• “Standard” difficulty has been renamed “Normal”
• Toned down the exploding Shades
• Rounded off the achievement icons and cursor
• Minor UI adjustments

Bug Fixes

• Fixed broken difficulty selection (free version only)
• Fixed current high score always showing as 0 when in Hardcore difficulty (DX version only)
• Fixed locked or DX-exclusive game modes not being shaded out
• Fixed locked Compendium and Sound Test entries not being shaded out