Searching Light — Dev story post

I have a birthmark on my wrist shaped like a clover. When I was born, the doctor said it would fade with time. It never did. It's still there. That's where the "Clover" in CloverTales comes from: a strange little mark I've carried my whole life that, against all odds, stayed.

That's more or less the story of this game too.

Before Searching Light

Searching Light didn't even exist at first.

I was making another game, Cloverstory

a fantasy-and-magic metroidvania, inspired by Final Fantasy and Castlevania. I was 15 and had no real idea how to program, so I was building the game and learning to code at the same time. The code was a beautiful, unmaintainable plate of spaghetti, but I poured hundreds of hours into it. So many that I kept a diary of all the progress: 30 full days of development. Then I moved to Colombia and ended up without a PC.

So I did the only thing I could

I wrote everything down in a notebook. Story, mechanics, levels, lore, drawings. Everything I wanted to build once I had a computer again. I still have that notebook. It's falling apart, but it's here.

The accident that changed everything

When I finally had a PC again and started studying programming in Medellín, I learned what I'd been missing: Java, algorithms, Python, math. Suddenly I could solve problems that used to be way over my head, and I started applying it in GameMaker. I also played a lot — but not just to play: I studied games, how they solved things, how they made every decision. My great teachers were Hyper Light Drifter, Celeste, Castlevania and, above all, Undertale. That one I loved. And one day I remembered a Nintendo DS game I played when I was very little. I don't even remember the name. A platformer with a green or blue character, where the top screen showed objects you couldn't see on the bottom one. That game was brutally hard for me (probably because my ADHD). But the idea stuck with me: two different perspectives of the same world.

I started drawing something similar in the notebook, but top-down. And almost without realizing it, I built it in GameMaker. It was just a little character walking between some blocks, but I loved the result. That's where Searching Light was born — almost by accident, as a proof of concept I never planned to finish.

What kept me going was people. I shared my progress in a Facebook group from a laptop so bad (2 or 4GB of RAM) that I couldn't even record the screen; I had to ask friends to record it for me. And, surprisingly, people liked it. They left kind comments. One of them was Chris, who saw the game with no sound and told me he wanted to help. We started working together, and that's when I left Cloverstory behind for good.

And then my brother showed up

I'm 8 years older than my brother. Back then he was about 7. A brutally honest little person: a crybaby, a yeller, a fighter, and affectionate only when it suited him (lol). I've always adored him. He's complicated and hard to understand, and he's one of the most creative people I know.

He was like that since he was a baby. When he was only a few months old, he took out my toy box and lined up all the animals in a row, by size. Before he could even speak, I gave him a pen and a notebook and asked him to draw a face. He drew a circle. "The eyes": two dots. "The nose": a swirl. "The mouth": a line. "The ears": two swirls. "The hair": some scribbles on top. He already understood the structure of a face and put it on paper. He was as sentimental and fragile as he was brilliant.

There's one memory that explains everything.

Back when kids he played Zelda

A Link to the Past , and he was really good, but he got frustrated a lot. He'd ask me to beat a certain boss for him, and I'd say no.

Not to be mean

I said no because I knew he could do it. He'd get angry, yell at me, cry… and within an hour he'd beaten it himself. That's how the whole damn game went. Every boss, he asked me for help; every time, I said no; and he finished the entire thing completely on his own. Without realizing it, that became the soul of Searching Light. It's not about someone coming to save you. It's about someone staying by your side while you discover that you could do it yourself.

How it really came together

When I ran out of creativity, I did something strange: I tried to think like my brother. What would he do here? How would he think about it? I tried to get inside his head, and things came out better. I'm not going to give him all the credit — I put in plenty of my own — but the truth is I decided to give the characters real lore and to create Nono, an autistic boy, in his honor. And from there came the other decision that defines the game: that no character would be perfect. That each of them would carry something. Moony, Yoru, Sol, Vee… each with their own thing. That's how Searching Light became what it is.

The part that's hard to tell

One day I told him I was dedicating the game to him. By then I was already living with my wife, and he came to visit. When I told him, he hit me with a "don't make me cry right now" and suddenly changed the subject.

But not to dodge it

he felt so good that he started telling me about other things and completely forgot what I'd just said. That's him. He still hasn't read the credits. The game isn't his style, it doesn't really grab him, and I understand that perfectly. When I finished it, the first thing I did was get some Steam keys and send him one so he could play.

He told me

"I don't want to play it, just delete it." He said it as a joke, being a little brat, and I know him. I don't expect him to play it. But it doesn't matter. My mission is already done.

Four copies

I'm going to be honest, because it's the only thing I know how to be. Searching Light has been on Steam for a month. Four people have bought it. Zero visibility, almost nobody has bought it yet.

And no, I didn't make it free, even though I dedicated it to my brother. I'm a solo dev and I want to live off this someday. I don't regret a thing. I know that one day it'll reach more people. For now it's four copies and a notebook falling apart. And that's enough to keep me going.

Searching Light is for you

It's for my brother. And it's for anyone who sees the world a little differently, who feels too much, who thinks too much, who has ever felt like they don't fit the mold. The game is strange because that's how some minds see the world. And seeing the world differently doesn't make you broken. I still have the notebook. It's worn out, almost falling to pieces. But it's here. Just like the clover on my wrist. Thank you for being here.

And don't be afraid we are monsters too.

— Orson (CloverTales)

Thank you for the 322 wishlists! You all deserve a giant hug!❤️