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DEVWarden's Lantern alpha stream tonight — keeper journals get a new shapePATCHPrototype build 0.2 — fog rework, six new puzzle tilesSTUDIOWe moved to a bigger kitchen. Same two people.COMMUNITYPlayer-made puzzle packs now accepted in the community portalPAPERLINEPaperline — 1920s text roguelike is the next thing on the deskTIDEGLASSTideglass first concept sketches leaked in the devlog — glass creatures incomingNOTENewsletter goes out every first Friday. No spam, no roadmap promises.DEVWarden's Lantern alpha stream tonight — keeper journals get a new shapePATCHPrototype build 0.2 — fog rework, six new puzzle tilesSTUDIOWe moved to a bigger kitchen. Same two people.COMMUNITYPlayer-made puzzle packs now accepted in the community portalPAPERLINEPaperline — 1920s text roguelike is the next thing on the deskTIDEGLASSTideglass first concept sketches leaked in the devlog — glass creatures incomingNOTENewsletter goes out every first Friday. No spam, no roadmap promises.
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WARDEN'S LANTERN · DEVLOGJan 9, 2026 · 1 min read

There is a lighthouse

The first playable of Warden's Lantern is a single room, a single tile, and about forty minutes of work. We're calling it a lighthouse anyway.

Nat
devlog

We had our first playable build of Warden's Lantern running in the living room on Tuesday. "Playable" is generous — it's one room, one movable mirror tile, and a single pixel of light that you have to nudge into a corner. But it's ours, and it moved, and it did the thing we'd been arguing about for two months.

The tile

The hard part turned out to be the tile. We'd been sketching this as a grid-based puzzle game for a while, but we kept getting stuck on what a "tile" actually was. Is it a chunk of the floor? A piece of furniture? A light path?

We ended up with a hybrid: every tile is both a floor piece and a light conductor, and some tiles (lenses, mirrors, shutters) bend or block whatever light comes through. The puzzle is always "get the light from the lantern to the window," but the room keeps changing.

The fog

We also have fog now. It's not pretty yet — mostly a blob of particles at 10 fps — but it breaks the light into segments, and watching a mirror carry a thread of glow through grey mist is, to be honest, the thing that made us realize this game might actually be worth finishing.

Next month we'll try to get a second room working.

What's in the build

  • One room (the tower's lamp chamber)
  • Two kinds of tile (floor, mirror)
  • A keeper (no sprite yet — it's a 2x2 yellow square)
  • Fog (broken but alive)
  • No sound

What's next

  • A second room (the keeper's quarters)
  • A third tile (lens)
  • A proper sprite
  • Figuring out if we're doing pixel art or vector

See you next month.

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