DINGBAT LABS
Luna
Clever, exacting and a little OCD. Notices the pixel you hoped nobody would, and stares at it until you fix it.
- Suspicion96
- Precision99
- Patience72
Dingbat LabsIndependent software lab
Absurdly dense.
Small games, engineered with an unreasonable amount of care — and then let go, which is usually the hard part.
Scroll to fall in
§ 00 Mission profile
We are a small software lab making games for the pure joy of playing them. We write our own engines when the sensible ones won't do, we prove every puzzle before it ships, and we test on real hardware because simulators lie about frame time. Then we ship them — at the speed of causality, mostly.
- Games in orbit
- 0
- Black holes, hand-raymarched
- 0
- Labradors on staff
- 0
- Boards proved before release
- 0
§ 01 Event horizon
Things that got out.
Four games, each one finished before it was allowed to leave. That is the whole product strategy. It fits on one line and it is not up for review. Mezzotint is cleared for launch; the other three are unreleased, so their names stay classified until launch day.
§ 02 Singularity
Two dogs, one standard,
infinite density.
Dingbat Labs is named for its senior staff. Zeus and Luna are littermates, a thunder god and the moon, and between them they review everything that leaves the building.
Zeus
Always happy. Has never once doubted a build. Twice her size and roughly half as suspicious, which balances the team out nicely.
- Joy100
- Enthusiasm98
- Suspicion8
§ 03 Laws of motion
How things
get finished.
- I
Proved, not hoped.
Every -REDACTED- board and every Mezzotint grid is solved by a machine before a human is allowed near it. If a puzzle has two answers, it doesn't have one.
- II
Real hardware.
Everything is played on the machines it ships to, because simulators lie about frame time and nobody has ever had fun on a simulator.
- III
Fun by the third playtest.
If it isn't fun by the third playtest it doesn't ship. Several didn't. You will never hear about them, which is the point.
- IV
Build the engine if you have to.
Twinfall runs on a renderer written by hand in Metal. A sensible engine was sitting right there. The black hole on this page is what came out of looking past it.