BLADE:13 — PRISM BREAK

An 8-bit cyberpunk survivors-like in 13 kilobytes. UNICORN, the city's rainbow-energy AI, has corrupted every machine into a prism beast. A standing chibi unicorn cuts back with one rainbow monomolecular blade, collects seven-color shards, and triggers PRISM BREAK before the BLACK UNICORN ends the run.

js13kGames 2026 entry — Theme: Unicorns and Rainbows — Desktop + Mobile

Play: TODO (link) Source: this repository

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Controls

Desktop

Key	Action
WASD / arrows	Move
SPACE	Blink (chain-strike up to N nearby foes)
F / Shift	PRISM BREAK (only when charged)
1 2 3	Pick a level-up card
M	Mute

Mobile — one thumb does everything

• Drag anywhere — a virtual stick appears under your thumb; drag to move.
• Tap (no drag) — Blink.
• The PRISM BREAK button only appears when it is charged.
• Portrait is auto-detected: the canvas, the pixel buffer and the card layout all re-flow.

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What is in there

• One-sword chibi unicorn. The hero is a standing emoji-profile unicorn in the original neon jacket and scarf. It attacks automatically with one reverse-grip blade; positioning is the whole game.
• Rainbow in every action. Normal slashes cycle the spectrum, Blink leaves rainbow ghosts and a prism ring, and PRISM BREAK turns the full combat layer into its most saturated state.
• Blink with charges. Two charges, each recharging over time; kills speed the recharge but a hard lockout means you can never spam it. Landing costs you a beat of attack recovery — blink is a decision, not a button.
• PRISM BREAK. Kills fill the meter, but it does not fire on its own. You choose the moment. Its mechanics are unchanged: while it runs, the screen tears into magenta/cyan chroma split and every kill extends it.
• 19 cards, three kinds. PROGRAM (blue) and CHROME (amber) are clean upgrades; OVERLOAD (red) always costs you something — +55% damage for −30% max HP, +50% attack speed for −25% reach. A few cards only appear once you have committed to a line. You will only ever see about a third of the pool in one run.
• Seven enemy families. Crawlers, dashers, brutes, hexers, splitters (die into two), bombers (detonate, and your blink can set them off deliberately), and hives that keep spawning until you go and kill them. Elites wear a magenta pulse; bosses telegraph a ground slam.
• Threat tiers. Every 22 seconds the threat level rises and a wave rolls in from one direction. The first BLACK UNICORN arrives at 32 seconds, and enemy speed keeps climbing until running is no longer an option.
• A city that generates itself. Streets, rooftops, neon and retracting spike traps all come out of one coordinate hash — no stored map, infinite in every direction.

Under the hood

Everything is drawn with Canvas 2D path commands. There are no images, no audio files, no external requests.

• Pixel pipeline. The world renders into a 320×200 offscreen buffer, then blits up 3× with smoothing off — real chunky pixels, NES-sampled palette. The UI is drawn at full resolution on top so text stays legible.
• Psychedelia tied to play. Trail feedback, scanline warping and hue drift all scale with your kill streak and PRISM BREAK, so the world literally destabilises as you snowball.
• Audio is synthesised at runtime. A small engine layers filtered-noise percussion over oscillators, through a generated convolution reverb, with stereo panning on hits and a ducking low-pass when you are struck. The soundtrack is a pentatonic look-ahead sequencer whose intensity rises with time.
• Adaptive quality. Smoothed frame time drives a hysteresis switch that drops warp bands and the chroma split on weaker devices.

Build

npm ci               # exact terser + roadroller versions from package-lock.json
python3 build.py     # src/*.js -> minify -> pack -> zip

build.py concatenates src/*.js in filename order, refuses to build if any external-request API appears in the source, minifies with terser, packs with Roadroller, and enforces both the 13,100-byte delivery target and the 13,312-byte hard limit. Roadroller parameters and zip metadata are fixed, so identical source produces an identical submission archive.

Output lands in build/:

• BLADE13-dev.html — readable single file, for debugging
• dist/index.html + BLADE13.zip — the submission package

Tests

sh tools/qa.sh
npm run verify       # full release probes + reproducible-build check

Three layers, all headless:

Layer	What it covers
bot-test.mjs	Simulation core — determinism, five-minute autoplay, value ranges, card-pool limits
render-smoke.mjs	Every render path against a proxied Canvas stub, across all four game states plus input
packed-smoke.mjs	The Roadroller-packed build actually runs — catches the classic "fine in dev, broken after packing" failure
runner-test.mjs	Dasher charge/burst timers stay finite and the burst actually occurs
pace-test.mjs	Opening density, enemy unlocks, 22-second threats and the 32-second first boss stay fixed
release-guard.mjs	Public text contains no blocked third-party names

Plus focused probes: cheese.mjs (bots that deliberately try to exploit sustain, fleeing and camping), bench.mjs (a kiting bot used for difficulty tuning), terrain.mjs, pose.mjs, port.mjs (portrait layout), perf.mjs, seed-sweep.mjs (deterministic seeds, for reproducing intermittent crashes).

Source layout

File	Role
src/00-core.js	Constants, PRNG, coordinate hash, terrain queries, player state
src/10-cards.js	Card pool, prerequisites, roll logic
src/20-game.js	Combat, spawning, waves, blink, PRISM BREAK, levelling
src/30-juice.js	Hitstop, rings, corpse halves, decals, combo, screen feedback
src/40-render.js	World and UI rendering, HUD, card screen, pixel icons
src/45-art.js	Character and creature art
src/50-audio.js	Synth, effect table, procedural soundtrack
src/60-main.js	Layout, input, pixel-buffer compositing, main loop

Credits

Built by Vion / Namek Game Studio for js13kGames 2026. Art, sound and code are original; no external assets.

License

MIT