Fanlight · Press kit
The night the great lens shatters, apprentice keeper Lucie climbs the tower alone. Place shards of glass, turn them with the crank, and bend, split and join the light until every wick on the floor is burning.
A hundred floors. Ten rooms. One storm, and a ship out on the rocks.
71 seconds · 1920×1080, 50 fps · captured from the game running in the Playdate Simulator, shown at 4× with the Playdate screen’s own grey tones · trailer.mp4
Fanlight is a lighthouse puzzle for Playdate. The night the great lens shatters, apprentice keeper Lucie climbs the tower alone. Place shards of glass, turn them with the crank, and bend, split and join the lamplight until every wick on the floor is burning.
Cape Fresnel, 3 November 1893. A gale from the west. Lightning strikes the lantern, and the great lens falls down the lighthouse stairs in a hundred pieces, one prism on every floor. Out in the storm, ships are looking for the light.
Old Amos, the head keeper, can’t make the climb. So his apprentice Lucie goes up alone, with his voice following her up the speaking tube.
Every floor is a small, quiet puzzle. A lantern throws a beam across a dark stone room. Set a shard of the broken lens in its path and it splits the light into a fan of three. Brass mirrors bend it. Turn any glass with the crank, one degree at a time, and watch the beams sweep the room. When every wick burns at once, the floor’s prism lights up and Lucie carries it to the next.
Ten rooms, a hundred floors, and each room adds one idea: gulls that must stay asleep, oil lamps that only catch from full-strength light, signal lanterns that pass the beam on, moonlight that moves with the clock, geared mounts, shutters, sea fog, and red and green sector lamps. At the top waits the lantern room, and the great lens itself.
All 20 screenshots are in screenshots/1x (native 400×240, pure black and white, exactly as the device draws them) and screenshots/4x (1600×960 in the Playdate screen’s grey tones).
A fanlight is the half-moon window of rays above an old front door. In the game, every lens shard throws a fan of three beams, and the name stuck.
The setting came from the physics. In 1819 Augustin Fresnel won the French Academy’s prize for his theory of diffraction, the bending and splitting of light that the lens shards do. Four years later his new lighthouse lens was lit for the first time. The two ideas at the heart of Fanlight really are one person’s life’s work, so the game is set in a lighthouse named after him.
The whole game is drawn for Playdate’s 1-bit screen: rooms are black until a lamp lights them, light pools are dithered, and every character, from Lucie to the one-eyed gull called the Admiral, is pixelled by hand.
The score is a slow waltz in A minor, in 6/8, for music box, harp and a soft pad, over the sea heard from inside the tower. Every wick plays a note of the same scale as it catches, so a fully lit room rings as a chord. The trailer uses an arrangement of the game’s theme on the same instruments.
Pixel art is 1× at heart. Scale it by whole numbers only (2×, 3×, 4×) with nearest-neighbour sampling, so every pixel stays square.