What is the history of development for the game "Marbles: Lights out"?
1. A weak start, but an idea
It all started when I got involved with the Lite Brite box and only 16 lights that could be found! Since I got interested in using the Lite Brite, but didn't have enough lights to do anything decent, I wanted to develop a game. Starting in mid 1998, I found a way to create a game using it. Having a ton of marbles, I realized that I could make the lights come out after repeated bombardment in the same area. After a while, the game was born. Though 16 lights made levels go by very quickly and it had almost no challenge. Because I was unable to get more lights, nor even thought of getting them, this game was left untouched until early 2002.
2. Four years later
In early 2002, I then asked my parents to get some lights for the Lite Brite, and indeed, 720 of them things was what I got, far more than I was even expecting, three times that of what is needed for hard mode! Eventually I got involved with that game, however, due to my odd sleep-wake cycle and that a long time ago I played these games when I was supposedly forced to go to bed by my parents.
During this time, back before 1999, developing the games was easy to do and came about in large numbers. After 1999, my sleep-wake cycle was even more bizarre. This made developing my games come almost to a stop. It was only when the computer, because it's very slow and outdated, took forever to format the hard drive, do a disk defrag, backing up my 3 gigs of files, burning a circular disk, etc.. This was the only time in which I could modify or play the game.
At one point, because my system was becoming highly unstable with errors occuring very frequently, I backed up my 3 gigs of files, which takes nearly an hour to do because of the slow computer, and since the parents were watching TV and I didn't have much of an interest in video games, I highly thought of getting Marbles: Lights Out modified to suit all versions.
3. Getting good requirements
It was first the minimums and requirements. I thought of having 5 difficulty levels as well. From playing many versions of random light numbers, like that of 25, 50, up to 300 once, and see how hard the game was. Still, there was no clear objective other than removing the lights.
After about 13 levels using 80 lights, I realized that a better objective was freeing caged marbles. Starting on round 14 with an image of the number 8 expanded almost to the full height, I've noticed that it was too big and that no marbles could get anywhere, thus I resized it to being within 10 "holes" from the top. Still, marbles tended to roll over the side quite frequently. This gave the idea of having the whole image stretch from left to right as much as possible. This made it much better, though only about 50 lights were used for the image of the 8. Using 50 lights made it seem too quick, so, I nearly doubled them to thicken the 8 making 95 lights. It was then a much better game.
Then, I thought of making a very complex image using almost all 720 lights, but room was rough with that many, so I used about 400 of them. Man were lights flyin' after many of them have been removed. Drop a marble, 3 lights come out of the gutter. Drop another, 2 lights come out, another for 3, another for 1, another for 4, and it went on! I found it funny so this idea brought about the 6th difficulty setting: custom.
After the computer finally got done backing up all those files, I went by and deleted all temporary and test files that I made to get it under 700 MB. Because of the nature of Winzip having to completely rewrite the file after deleting, this called for another wait, about another 40 minutes. During this 40 minutes I started to set some standards for the difficulty levels.
4. Difficulty standards
Easy had to be quick and, the most obvious, easy. Easy difficulty would require few cages and few lights with lots of marbles. Easy-medium, which was slightly harder, had to have more cages and more lights with fewer marbles. Each progressively harder difficulty required more cages, more lights, but fewer marbles as you go up.
Setting the standards for the custom level wasn't all that difficult. Because you need at least 1 cage, it takes a minimum of 7 lights to make a cage. There's no limit to how many cages you need or want. There's no limit to the number of marbles you want, the lights needed [the real limit is what you can get following the design rules and the size of your board], all with minimal restrictions, which is what "custom" basically stands for.
As of Dec 7, 2003, a new mode was thought of. This mode, called "diggers mode", is a mode in which you need to dig down as much as you can. This edition is very new, and hasn't been truly tested yet, so it's currently unavailable. It started when I was writing this history page and the concept of digging that I seem to like. Since this date, I haven't really thought much into developing this "diggers mode".
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