Been a while since I last posted about my game. As such this post will be a catch up that assumes you have read none of my previous posts about my game.

So, what game am I making? I am making my take on a classic game: Lights Out. In the game you have a 5X5 grid of lights with some number of those lights turned on. Your objective is to turn them all off (as the name suggests), the cavate is that if you press one of the lights the lights adjacent to it also toggle on/off. This creates a puzzle for the player to solve. It took me a bit to figure out the background logistics of how to make this work in Unity (that “Right way to do it” mind set I had getting in the way here and there) but eventually I got the basic game working.

That is when I started making my takes on the game. The first alt version I call match pattern. In this mode rather than trying to turn out all the lights you are trying to match a given pattern of lights. The second alt version adds a different dimension. In the basic and match pattern game the lights only have an on and off state, in this new version the lights have an off and 3 on modes with the objective still being to turn them all off.

So far we have 3 versions of this puzzle game, but where are the puzzles? Now, I could (and sometimes do) hand make these puzzles, but instead I created a program to create these puzzles for me, basically by working backwards. The program starts with a blank grid (or a completely randomized one if creating a match pattern) and simulating moves until it reaches the number of target moves desired. Using this I both created 100+ puzzles to progress through for each mode and a randomized version for each mode.

Since creating all of this I played with creating a tutorial (but have currently put it on the back burner as the game feels self explanatory enough) and several passes on the UI elements. Now I am working on the visual design and figuring out how to get the game published to the Apple and Android stores (and pc if it is viable).