Between Pocket Orchard and Lumen Drift there was another game. It was called Harbor Lights, a gentle boat-routing puzzler set in a foggy fishing town. We worked on it for eleven months. Then we stopped, and nobody outside the studio ever saw it.
It looked wonderful
That was part of the problem. Harbor Lights was the most beautiful thing we'd made. The fog shader alone took six weeks. Every screenshot we posted in our Discord got the warmest reactions we'd ever had. We confused "people love how it looks" with "people love playing it".
The playtests told us early
Looking back at our notes, the warning signs were there by month four. Testers finished the tutorial, said something kind, and handed the phone back. Nobody asked to keep playing. Nobody asked when it would come out. In our experience, that silence is the loudest feedback there is.
We kept adding polish to a game that needed a different idea. Polish is a very comfortable place to hide.
Why it was so hard to stop
- Sunk cost. Eleven months is about €60,000 of our savings, and it felt like throwing it away.
- Identity. We'd told friends, family and a few journalists. Cancelling felt like admitting we weren't real developers.
- Hope. There was always one more mechanic that might fix it.
How we decided
In the end we gave ourselves a test. We each wrote, separately, one sentence describing why someone would play Harbor Lights instead of any other puzzle game. Our sentences didn't match, and neither of us found our own convincing. We cancelled it that afternoon, went for a long lunch, and started prototyping on paper the next morning.
What survived
Not all of it was lost. The fog shader became the soft glow in Lumen Drift. The level editor we built is the one we still use. And the most important thing we kept was a rule: by month three, every prototype must pass the "hand it back" test. If strangers return the phone without asking for more, we change direction — no matter how pretty it is.
Lumen Drift passed that test in its second week. We'd never have made it without Harbor Lights failing first.