This is what it looked like during and after the dev process for Merry & Bright & CRI ≥ 95, the game I made for Ludum Dare 60. Photos are links to themselves for easy zoom-in-ing.
First step is to fill a whiteboard with ideas. I really wanted to make a space invaders game where you could only use two of your ship's systems at a time depending on what you had in your terminal's A: and B: drives, but it never came together as a complete concept. Instead I foolishly decided to make my first ever puzzle game.
I went looking for prior art. There's a map coloring game in Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection because of course there is.
Prototyping puzzles with pencil and paper, plus pyramids standing in for lights. I quickly found out that more symmetrical graphs make less interesting puzzles.
My first impulse was to do pixel art graphics like in all my past entries. I got this far tracing some photos of our bookshelf before I decided it was going to be too slow and pivoted to pencil drawings.
First working screenshot from the digital game, circa Friday night.
The window puzzle was inspired by this illustration from a Wikipedia article on graph theory.
Complete scan of a page of drawings. The lights on this tree were too close together, so I drew a new one and photoshopped it into the existing living room. I found that the size of the small pyramids roughly corresponded to the size of the lights on screen, so I used them as spacers. Note the custom cursor that didn't make it into the final game.
Up late Sunday trying to figure out how to do Foley work with mouth noises and keyboard switches. The sound effects turned out so annoying that I kept the game silent.
I may have bought a USB floppy drive for the occasion. The game fits comfortably in 1.44 MB.
2026-11-07
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