Project

Flikr

A lighting-puzzle platformer where you are the lamp. Your light shows the way and draws the moths. Charge it into a beam, and it kills them.

Cornell’s 2026 game design showcase Source on GitHub
Flikr key art: the title in brass lettering on a shelf of a wizard’s curios, drawn in sepia
8people on the team
100+playtests
Steamwhere it’s headed

My part

  1. LeadSPAM-B Studios, the studio I co-founded: I run the milestone reviews and make the scope calls.
  2. Designthe game’s interface, in the levels and out, and the wizard who teaches you to play, whom I also animated.
  3. Writethe ambient score and the stakes behind the puzzles.

In motion

Thirty seconds of a May build: Lumi fires its beam, and the moths win anyway. Mine: the wizard, the energy gauge and the health bulbs.
My animation of Lumo, the lamp I drew in the course’s design lab.

Why I built it

Flikr began as a semester project in Cornell’s intro game design course, and we kept going. Getting it to Steam means holding the scope to a timeline and keeping the team together on our own.

How it plays

You play Lumi, a wizard’s enchanted lamp, in a mansion where a potion has set the furniture floating and filled the rooms with light-hungry moths. Your beam activates platforms and kills moths, but every shot costs energy and every hit breaks a bulb, so each room is a question of where to shine and for how long.

A beam of light from the lamp cuts across a dark study, lighting a floating platform and two mothsLumi on a desk in a candlelit study, with floating books and a chandelier aboveThe lamp’s light bouncing off a standing mirror in a dark bedroom
Bouncing the light off a mirror is a trick the wizard teaches in level 7.

What I decided

  • Prove the core mechanic before building on it. The lamp-light reveal went through four rounds of playtesting before we built a real level around it.
  • Make every feature earn its place in a playtest. Every delay we’ve had came from saying yes to one more “what if we also”.
  • Review scope at every milestone. Coordination was never the hard part. Saying no, to good ideas from people I like, was.

Before Lumi, Lumo

In the course’s design labs I drew a lamp of my own, Lumo, and wrote its brief. Put away in storage, in an eerie house full of creatures out to get it, Lumo has one power: if it tries hard enough, “it can shine its light so bright that it will kill its enemy.”

The team put my turnaround in their visual design specification, and my animation on their slide of inspirations. Teammates drew Lumi as the game ships it, with Lumo’s power.

Lumo, my design-lab character sheet: a teal gooseneck lamp drawn from the front, three-quarter, side and back, with sketches of it lighting the way, killing bugs, jumping, and falling and dying
My turnaround of Lumo, over sketches of its moves.

My pause menu started in those labs too, as a stack of scorched paper held with a paper clip.

My design-lab pause menu: PAUSED, OPTIONS, RESUME and EXIT lettered on a stack of torn, scorched paper held with a paper clip
Its words are painted on.

Outside the levels

In the game, one sheet of paper serves all eight languages, its words set from one list. Level-select plaques stay hidden until the levels before them are cleared.

The title screen: Flikr’s title over the wizard’s shelf of curios, with Play, Options and Quit on three paper plaquesThe level select: the mansion in silhouette on a drafting table, with 12 plaques on its floors, the first nine lit, and the menu cursor, a brass pointer, on the tenth, which wears a gilt edgePaused: the stack of paper from my lab, held with its paper clip, with Paused, Options, Resume and Exit set in typewriter type over the darkened levelOptions: a sheet of torn paper listing Controls, Audio, Video and Language, then BackControls: a keyboard and a mouse drawn on the paper with the game’s keys filled in, over the list: W or I to jump, A or J and D or L to move, E to drop a light, Shift to dash, Space or a right click to turn the light on and off, a left click to attackAudio: Music and SFX, the sound effects, each with its own sliderVideo: a slider for gammaThe language page switched to Korean: 언어, language, over 한국어, Korean, between two arrows, and 뒤로, back
My menus, drawn from the team’s repository, the last switched to Korean.

The heads-up display’s energy gauge holds three beam shots, refilling one every four and a half seconds. Batteries mend your three bulbs, adding blue ones past three; dropping a decoy light costs one.

Two moments of the heads-up display: on the left, the energy gauge a third spent and the third of three bulbs broken; on the right, the gauge full to its tip and a fourth bulb, in blue
After a hit and a shot (left); after a battery (right).

The wizard is mine too.

The wizard in his speech bubble: a pixel-art wizard in a tall blue hat and a long white beard, his mouth open, in a cloud of violet magic and sparkles, saying, “Use ‘A’ and ‘D’ to MOVE.”
My animation, with three of his lines, from levels 1, 2 and 7.

I designed both screens that end a level: the results and the death screen.

Results, in a gilt frame on striped wallpaper: Time Elapsed 01:24, Health 3 / 3, Moths Killed 2 / 2 and Grade A, with a replay arrow and a close mark painted on the frame, and Lumi, the green banker’s lamp, dancing beside itThe death screen: TRY AGAIN arched over a dark theater stage, Retry and Quit on paper plaques, and Lumi’s ghost, winged and haloed, rising from the broken lamp
A sample run of level 10, in 1:24 with every bulb and both moths. Lumi’s dance and ghost are frames of the game’s animations.

The cursors are mine as well: a brass pointer for menus, a crosshair for play.

The two cursors, enlarged: the brass menu pointer, its blade reaching up and to the left, and the white crosshair of four T-shaped bars
At five times their 32-pixel size.

The manual for the downloads is mine too.

The front cover: Flikr in brass letters, its i a light bulb on a column of brass beads, over Spam B Studios, on dark blue leather inside a gilt frame of scrollworkThe title page: the same brass Flikr and Spam B Studios on old cream paper, inside a gilt frame of scrollworkSystem Requirements, under a torn star of old engravings and a strip of tape: Windows 7 (32-bit) or later, or macOS 10.12 or later; a dual-core 2.0 gigahertz processor, an i3 or the AMD equivalent; 4 gigabytes of memory; integrated graphics with OpenGL 2.0 or later; 512 megabytes of disk space; a screen of at least 640 by 360; and a keyboard, with a mouse recommended. Sheet music and lined paper are torn along the bottomDownload, under a strip of an old envelope and a torn edge of stamps: visit our page, click Download and choose the file for your laptop, and when the browser asks where to save it, pick Downloads and wait for it to finishInstallation, under a moth and a scrap of lined paper. On Windows, open Downloads and double-click flikr-windows.zip, drag the Flikr-windows folder somewhere easy to reach, and double-click Flikr.exe to play; if it’s blocked, unblock it in its properties. On a Mac, double-click flikr-mac.zip, drag Flikr.app into Applications and double-click it; if it’s “from an unidentified developer”, Control-click it, open it, and open it once from Terminal. A notice says the Mac app isn’t signed by an Apple developer and sends you to a website for help, its address still a placeholder, “[put link here]”Uninstallation, beside a clipped index card and a scrap of a handwritten letter: on Windows, delete the Flikr folder and empty the Recycle Bin; on a Mac, move Flikr.app to the Trash and delete it immediately. Black paper stars spill from an envelope in the cornerThe Incident, the start of the story in pixel-art frames: a note, “Bye, Lumi! Take care of the house!! Be a good magic lamp”, as its owner waves goodbye at the door; “the desire to be helpful…”, Lumi nodding; and “the ambition…”, Lumi lit up beside the words “I’ll be the best!”“a small mistake…”: Lumi hops along a shelf, then BONK, its shade knocks into a flask of purple potion, a drawn-out “OH NO!!!” as the flask tips, and “the great fall…”, “OH NO…”, the flask on its side in a sparkle of spilled potion“the chaos…”: a bottle of purple potion, smoking, beside a torn sign that says Levitation Potion, then a tidy study of books, plants and a chest of drawers, and the same study with everything afloat in a purple glow“the light at the end of the tunnel..?”: Lumi spinning in a panic, “What do I do??”, beside a framed flower, then spotting a book on a high shelf in a beam of light, MAGIC HELP, with a wizard on its coverObjectives, under a pink paper moon and stars: left to look after the mage’s mansion, Lumi the enchanted lamp trips over a levitation potion and sets the furniture floating. Help it through a dark house full of angry, light-hungry moths, with beams of light that activate platforms, solve puzzles and fight the moths, while you manage its energy and health, and reach the attic for the last ingredient of the antidote, the moonlight, before the owner comes homeControls: Lumi over the W, A and D keys, “WAD / IJL + Space Bar to move”; Lumi dashing in three fading copies over the space bar, “Space / Shift for dash”; Lumi turning its shade toward a crosshair over a mouse, “Move Cursor to aim”; and Lumi firing a beam at the crosshair over a mouse with its left button filled in, “Left click to use a light beam”More controls: Lumi lying on its side over the E and U keys, “E/U to place a light”; a light bulb over the S and K keys, “S / K to toggle”; and my pause menu, the stack of paper with Paused, Options, Resume and Exit, over the Escape key, “ESC to open menu”A blank page of the manual’s old paper, in place of the credits“Thank you for playing!” on a heart torn out of old paper, with green paper stars and scraps of old star charts in two cornersThe back cover: the SPAM-B Studios logo on a ticket stub taped to the dark blue leather, inside the same gilt frame
The manual, to flip through. Its credits page names the team, so a blank page stands in.

What it sounds like

My title-screen track ships with the next build. Until then, tune the radio on the Play page to SCORE for four pieces as they stand.

Lumi’s win dance for reaching the end, from the game’s own sprites.