Turbo Pudding
All of Lullalotl grows out of one small idea. You tap the water, a ring spreads out, and every friend it touches sings and sends out a ring of their own. It’s Wednesday, so here’s a dev diary about how that ripple works inside the game, and how we tuned ten ponds around it.
The picture at the top is Bubble Bend, the second pond, a moment after one tap. Two friends are already singing, the rings of their answers are heading for the neighbors, and Lulla watches from her stone at the edge.
A ring that travels
Every drop starts a wave. Its ring grows from the spot you tapped and slows down a little as it gets wider, the way a real ripple does. A friend sings the moment the edge of the ring passes over them, then sends out their own ring about an eighth of a second later. That tiny pause is what makes a chain sound like a chain and not like one big chord.
We look at the pond from an angle, so the rings are drawn as flat ovals, not circles, and the game measures reach the same way. A friend above or below the drop has to sit a bit closer than one to the left or right. In Pebble Steps, a stone between a ring and a friend keeps that friend from hearing it. In Whisper Reeds, a ring reaches into a reed patch only 70 percent as far, but a friend sitting in the reeds sings one and a half times sweeter.
Once per wave
Each friend sings only once per wave. Without that rule, two friends side by side would keep waking each other forever, and the pond would never go quiet. A wave ends when nothing of it is still traveling: no ring on the water and no answer still waiting to go out. When every friend in the pond sings from one drop, and there are at least three of them, the game calls out “Perfect harmony!” and the whole wave pays three times as much. Once you have three friends, the game gives you a tip: “Drag friends closer: one ripple can wake them all.”
We also cap the water. At most 12 fresh rings from your taps and 8 from the rain can be out at once, and when one more lands, the oldest of the same kind fades away. It keeps the water easy to read, and the game smooth on a phone.
Where two waves meet
From Bubble Bend on, two rings of different waves that touch on open water open a lotus, a Harmony Bloom. The game watches for two kinds of meeting: two rings touching edge to edge from outside, and a newer ring catching up with an older one from inside. The lotus opens right at the touching point. It won’t open too close to a friend, a stone or another lotus, and at least one of the two rings has to be yours, so the rain alone can’t fill the pond with flowers.
Rain that plays by itself
The rain cloud is the part of the pond that plays without you. It shows up in the shop once you have two friends, and then it drops water by itself: one drop every 3.2 seconds at the first level, with each new level cutting the wait by 10 percent, up to level 15. Rain waves pay half of what your own waves pay, so the cloud never plays better than you do.
About every four minutes, for five seconds, the rain falls twice as fast and all golden: “Golden rain!” A golden drop pays double and spreads a wider ring. About one in forty of your own taps turns golden, too.
Tuning ten ponds with a simulator
Each pond has its own Glow and its own shop. To set the numbers, we wrote a simulator that plays every pond with the game’s own rules and scoring, the very same code, and reports how long it takes to wake the Moon.
Our reference player taps 0.7 times a second. The target for Lily Cradle is three minutes, and it climbs pond by pond to twelve and a half minutes for Moon Mirror. The simulator plays each pond to its target time and makes the Glow earned by then that pond’s goal. It also checks for long gaps between two buys. Other runs tap under a random friend instead of a well-chosen one, or play for four minutes, leave for three hours and come back.
While you’re away
When you close the game, the rain keeps singing at half speed for up to eight hours. But one absence fills at most a quarter of the Moon meter, and the Moon never wakes without you. When the jar is full, the game says so: “The Moon wakes only while you play.”
The first two ponds, Lily Cradle and Bubble Bend, are free to play in your browser at lullalotl.com, with the rain cloud and Harmony Bloom included. The full game, all ten ponds, is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on its Lullalotl page.
