Lumen 1.2: Lumen Unlimited and walks
Lumen: Light & Mirrors 1.2 is out on the App Store and Google Play. The optics workshop stays free, and one purchase, Lumen Unlimited, opens every building above it. Buildings you have finished now make new puzzles for you on the spot. The browser version stays free in full. Your saved progress carries over.
What’s new
- Lumen Unlimited. The optics workshop is free, and it is where the game teaches itself. Lumen Unlimited is a one-time purchase, not a subscription, at $4.99 in the US. It opens the prism laboratory, the observatory, the light tower and every building we add later, and it takes the limit off walks. Restore purchase is on its page and in Settings.
- Nothing you reached is taken away. If you had solved a puzzle in a building before this update, that building stays open without a purchase.
- Walks. Finish a building and it offers walks: new puzzles made on the spot, with that building’s board and pieces. A walk pays the coins its light picks up and leaves your progress as it was. Without Lumen Unlimited there are five walks every five hours, with five minutes of rest after each.
- A new icon, new Settings and a new level map. The icon shows the lantern side on. Settings is laid out in the game’s brass and stone. The room map stands on the same stone as the title screen, and the room tabs in the level picker carry the marks that say what each room does to the light.
- Music on the menus only. Calm music plays on the title screen and the maps. On the board you hear only the quiet sounds of mirrors and coins.
- Fixed: a dark screen with no way out. In the rooms where the light burns down, closing the panel that said it had gone out, by tapping beside it, left a dark board and nothing to press. The panel now stays until you choose Try again or Levels.
A generated puzzle keeps the rules of a level
Every level in Lumen passes the same test. Its mirror budget is the fewest mirrors the board allows, and every one of them is needed. A walk is made on your phone in the moment you ask for it, and it has to pass that test too.
A walk is drawn route first. The light leaves the lamp, turns at the mirrors the answer will hold, passes whatever the building is about and ends at the crystal. Walls are scattered off that route. Then the same search the test suite runs over the hand-made levels looks for any way to light the crystal with fewer mirrors, under every setting of the shutters. Each shortcut it finds is walled off, and the search runs again until there are none. Coins go on the route, never where the light travels before the first mirror.
The building’s idea has to matter as well. A colored crystal stands behind the only lens of its color. A colored gate is the only door in a wall across the board. In the tower, a wall with no door at all can be crossed only through the portals. The same seed always makes the same board. A walk takes a few milliseconds to make, under seventy on the slowest seeds we measured, and the tests generate forty walks for every building and hold each one to every rule, with a much deeper search than the phone uses.
A purchase with no server
Lumen has no accounts and no server of its own, and the purchase does not change that. On iPhone and iPad a small plugin asks StoreKit which purchases this Apple account owns. On Android the same plugin asks Google Play Billing. The rest of the game only asks whether a building is open, never how it was paid for.
The store’s last answer stays on the device, so the game opens the same way with no connection. A fresh answer replaces it, so a refund closes the buildings again. The right to keep what you had reached is worked out once, the first time 1.2 reads your save, and resetting your progress keeps it. Apple and Google take the payment, and we never learn who bought. The app’s privacy label still says Data Not Collected.
The browser game and the YouTube Playables version give everything away. Only the apps register the store plugin, so those two builds carry no store code at all.
Forty-eight screenshots
The store pages needed six new screens in four languages on iPhone and iPad. A script now takes them: it builds the game for the simulators, seeds a save, taps through each screen the way a player would, and asks a small server on the Mac to take the picture. Two things in the simulators had to be caught along the way. Now and then the iPhone simulator drew its Dynamic Island into the frame, a pill of pure black that no screen of the game ever contains, so the server looks for it and takes the picture again. And a cold iPad simulator sometimes stalled WebKit’s drawing entirely, so a frame of one flat color is refused too, and the step starts over from a fresh page.
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Play in your browser → See the game and screenshots → Read about 1.1 and the light tower →