Constellar: The Story

Games often have a story behind them. Here's the story of Constellar.

The "House" level (pictured left) was my first introduction to the kind of connect-the-dots brain teaser featured in Constellar and I discovered it in a Pizza Hut. Back when I was eight or nine we lived in Virginia. I always looked forward to going out for pizza not just for food, but also for the placemats which always had pictures to color, mazes, jokes and brain teasers on them. My brother and I would always ask our server to borrow a pen so we could finish the mazes or play the little games together.

 I remember seeing the five dots with the instructions to draw a house without picking up your pencil or retracing a line. It took a few tries, but finishing that little puzzle became one of the sparks that has fueled a life long fascination with math and brain teasers.

In college I took classes on graph theory, among other things. I learned about circuits and cycles and Eulerian graphs. Finding paths and circuits was a common homework assignment. I learned about the mathematical underpinnings of this kind of brain teaser and the fascinating set of rules that governed the strategies for solving them.

Thirty years later I'm now making games that matter to me. I'm so lucky that in this period of my life I have the opportunity to create things drawn from my life experiences. I get to make games that I want to play as an adult and that I would love to be able to introduce to my eight year old self.