A particularly creative developer has just proposed to his girlfriend in the most adorable way — by developing a custom game for Panic's pocket-sized handheld, the Playdate (thanks @Eurogamer for the spot!).
Aaron Nielsen, the developer in question, is a former Sea of Thieves game designer, who now works at Playside Studios in Australia. He took to Twitter recently to share the news of his engagement online with his followers and also gave a bit of an insight into his elaborate proposal.
According to Nielsen's thread, he wanted to do something "special" for the "love of [his] life", so he decided to make his girlfriend her very own game. Being "a coding novice", he turned to the Pulp editor in order to achieve this, and devised a small project called Love Letters.
In total, Nielsen states that the game took about 6 months to develop (with the help of the Playdate community) and claims that it underwent a bunch of iterations in that time. His original idea, for instance, was to make the project a platformer, but after some playtests, the decision was made to switch it to more of "a hi-score-based arcade experience".
This would see the player having to deliver the correct letters to their corresponding letterbox before a timer ran out, with each correct letter delivered increasing the score multipliers and additional time bonuses. However, the timer and scoreboard were all a distraction, with the game eventually switching over to another screen that read "Will you marry me?" with the options being either "yes" or "no".
Nielsen's girlfriend picked 'yes' fortunately, but he did write that he had prepared for the outcome should she have selected "no". He jokes the dialogue tree would simply have asked her "Are you sure?" and then looped back around again.