Bubble Escape 2K (2009)
Bubble Escape 2K is a tiny maze-escape game for the Commodore 64 by Chris Pressey of Cat's Eye Technologies, squeezed into just 2,043 bytes. You are a sentient soap bubble imprisoned by a ruling class of dragons, and you must drift through a dungeon of rooms to find the five keys that open its only exit. Walls, moving barriers, fireballs, sentry robots and dragon officials all pop you on contact, so the whole game is about controlling your momentum. It is the author's own assembly remake of a BASIC game he wrote as a teenager, and he says it won the 2K category of the 2009 Mini Game Compo. Copyright (c) 2009-2021 Chris Pressey, Cat's Eye Technologies; released under the BSD 3-Clause license (codeberg.org/catseye/Bubble-Escape).
Objective Collect the five keys hidden around the dungeon and reach the exit without popping. Controls • Joystick (port 2): push in any direction to accelerate the bubble that way • Fire: start a new game after losing all lives Tips • The bubble keeps drifting, so tap the joystick gently and brake early • Touching a wall pops you just like an enemy does • The more keys you hold, the sooner sentries start chasing you after you enter a room • Keep sound on: the game uses the sound chip to generate random numbers Modes • 1 Player, 9 lives