TAG
#stephen-lavelle
0 reviews · 3 essays
Related essays
English Country Tune (2011) — Where an Egg Falls Changes Every Time It Moves
On November 25, 2011, Stephen Lavelle (increpare) — a developer who had already released over 500 free games — put a price on one for the first time: English Country Tune. Its Sokoban-like opening, pushing eggs into incubators, quickly collapses into a rule where gravity itself rewrites with every move. Nominated for Design Excellence at IGF 2012, it precedes the free PuzzleScript engine (2013), 2016's Stephen's Sausage Roll, and — by the creator's own account — Baba Is You. We trace, with sources, the origin of Lavelle's uncompromising design philosophy.
PuzzleScript (2013) — The One-Line Rule That Mass-Produced the World's “Pushing Games”
In October 2013, indie developer Stephen Lavelle (increpare) released PuzzleScript, a free browser-based puzzle engine whose Sokoban-style push rule fits on a single line of code. Traced forward, it runs through Alan Hazelden's early jam games into A Good Snowman Is Hard to Build, and — by Hempuli's own account — into the block-pushing puzzle revival that fed Baba Is You. Here the lineage is checked against the record.
Inside Stephen Lavelle's Philosophy — Making the Refusal to Explain Into the Work
"Nah I don't feel like it." That was how Stephen Lavelle (Increpare) answered a player who asked him to explain his puzzle design. The prolific maker of 500-plus freeware games, the author of the free engine PuzzleScript and of Stephen's Sausage Roll. I read his philosophy, obsessions, failures, dilemmas and influences using only words he himself wrote.
