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Disastrous Flying Critters
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About the game
Disastrous Flying Critters is a flying action game about colour. The Rainbow Kingdom is made of six lands, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, and portals have opened in each of them. Out of the portals pour little winged critters, and everything they touch takes on their colour, the ground, the walls and you. As the Rainbow Witch Princess, you pick a land on the world map and fly in to put it right.
Your magic always has a colour, shown by your outfit, and you can switch it at any moment. That matters because critters and portals cannot be hurt by their own colour: to destroy an orange portal you must be anything but orange. You can also defeat a critter by landing on its head with your magic slippers. Colour works on the scenery too. Blocks of your own colour let you fly straight through them, so changing colour opens shortcuts and closes them.
Once the last portal and critter are gone, a portal home appears and you have a minute to tidy up. Every blast you fire paints the tiles it hits, so use the time to cover the land in its rightful colour. The percentage you restore is recorded for that land, and after all six the princess hears how the whole kingdom did.
Playing it here
Disastrous Flying Critters was made for TIC-80, a fantasy console: an imaginary 1980s-style computer with a 240 by 136 screen and 16 colours, for which independent developers write new games. David Haslem wrote it in the Fennel programming language for the Spring Lisp Game Jam 2023 and later reworked it; this is that enhanced edition. It runs here in the official TIC-80 web player. Click Play, choose "Play Game" with Z and press Z to move the opening conversation along.
"Play Two Player" adds a second witch, steered with a second gamepad. Progress is not saved, so each visit starts a fresh kingdom. Esc opens the TIC-80 menu. A gamepad works directly, and on touch screens an on-screen D-pad and buttons appear. The game is in English.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| ↑ | fly upwards (gravity pulls you down when you let go) |
| ← / → | fly left or right |
| ↓ | drop faster; held while landing on a critter, a higher bounce |
| Z (A button) | cast a magic blast; next line of dialogue; confirm |
| X (B button) | switch to the next colour |
| A (X button) | switch to the previous colour |
| Arrow keys (menus, world map) | choose |
| Esc | TIC-80 menu |
A few things worth knowing
Never match your target. Before firing at a portal or a critter, check your colour. If it matches, your blasts do nothing; one press of X or A fixes it.
Getting hit changes your colour. A critter that touches you costs one of your three hearts and paints you its colour, so blocks you were flying through turn solid and enemies of that colour stop taking damage. Switch back straight away.
Close the portals first. Portals keep releasing critters while you are nearby, and each critter repaints the land as it flies. Destroying the portal stops the flow; the critters left over are easier to mop up.
Spend the last minute painting. The tidy-up time after the battle is what lifts a land's score, so fly low and blast the ground in the land's own colour before heading through the portal home.
Credits and licence
Disastrous Flying Critters was created by David Haslem, who wrote the code and made the graphics, sound and music; his daughters Fiona and Ada worked with him on the ideas and tested the game. It began as an entry in the Spring Lisp Game Jam 2023. The code is free software under the MIT licence, and the graphics, sound and music are under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence, as stated on the author's itch.io page. It runs here in the TIC-80 web player (MIT licence). The licence texts are linked from this page.