Patrick Traynor, developer of both Patrick’s Parabox and Linelith, has created a wonderful interactive timeline to show how the puzzle and world design of his recent puzzle game Linelith evolved throughout its development.
For those who haven’t played Linelith yet, it’s a super snappy line-drawing puzzler, released as part of CosmOS 9, a bundle of other-wordly puzzle games. Brimming with surprises and only an hour long, you’d do well to experience Linelith yourself before diving into this spoiler-filled interactive exploration of its design. Okay, you were warned — now on to the spoilers…
To create the timeline, Patrick has generated screenshots of the game’s world from the project's history of git commits, effectively snapshots of the game as it progressed through development. You can sweep through all 32 points in time from start to finish with the slider or step through change-by-change, reading Patrick’s thoughts and recollections on how the game evolved over time.
It's super neat to learn about how some of my favorite games were designed and this is such a neat way of visualizing the process. Here’s hoping for more like this to come!
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