Lumen 1.2.1: the conservatory
Lumen: Light & Mirrors 1.2.1 is out on the App Store and Google Play. It adds a fifth building, the conservatory, a glasshouse at the top of the climb. In the apps it opens with Lumen Unlimited, like every building above the free workshop. The browser version has it too, free in full. Your saved progress carries over.
What’s new
- The conservatory. Four new rooms and 32 new levels. Each board has a prism that splits white light into a red ray and a blue one, and every crystal here wants one color. Then comes a dark crystal, which must stay dark. Each room opens with a short walkthrough on its first level.
- Three free walks a day. Without Lumen Unlimited you now get three walks a day, with five minutes of rest after each. They come back at midnight on your phone’s clock. Before, it was five walks in a window of five hours. With Lumen Unlimited walks have no limit, as before.
- A walk when nothing is left to play. Once you solve every level, the main button takes you on a walk in the building you pick, rather than back to the last level. A free player who has finished the workshop sees Take a walk there too, with the walks left today on the button, rather than a locked Continue.
- Fixed: a title screen that scrolled. On a tablet, the main screen could scroll by a few pixels. The lantern art now leaves room for the footer, so the screen stays still.
A prism in a game of mirrors
A real prism bends blue light more than red. Lumen keeps exactly that much of the physics. The prism stands on a diagonal, like a mirror. It turns blue light the way a mirror on that diagonal would, and it lets red light straight through. White light is both colors, so it leaves the prism as two rays. Light that is already colored passes or turns, and is not parted again.
That one rule changes the puzzles more than it seems. In the light tower a splitter already sent the beam two ways, but both rays were the same color. Here the two halves differ, and the half you do not need still has to go somewhere. The conservatory has no lenses, so the prism is the only way to get colored light, and every crystal wants a color. A red crystal lit by blue light stays dark, as it did in the observatory.
A dark crystal has to earn its place
Every level in Lumen is held to the same test. Its mirror budget is the fewest mirrors that can light the crystal, and every one of them is needed. A search runs over every arrangement with fewer mirrors and has to find none that works.
The dark crystal gets a test of its own. Take it off the board, run the search again, and a level must now be solvable with fewer mirrors. If it is not, the dark crystal was decoration, and the level fails. So in every level of rooms 20 and 21 the dark crystal guards a shortcut, or stands where the half of the light you do not need would land.
The levels themselves were drawn by the same generator that makes walks. It draws the route first, through the prism. Then it scatters walls off the route and walls off every cheaper way the search finds, until there is none. We picked the boards by hand for a mix of colors, prism angles and lamp rows, and for few walls, and did not edit them afterwards. The walks in the conservatory come from the same generator, so a finished conservatory makes new boards on the spot: two colored crystals, or one crystal and a dark one.
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