u/Wild_Conversation851

Candlewise launched today on Google Play after about a year of solo development in Godot 4. First commercial title, first mobile game, first time taking anything through to production.

It's a cosy Akari (Light-Up) logic puzzle. Place candles to illuminate every dark corner of a room. Light shines along each candle's row and column until it meets a wall. No two candles may face each other. 145 hand-crafted rooms across five chapters.

Why Godot 4

Hobbyist background, no budget, needed something I could learn end-to-end. GDScript let me stop fighting the tooling and focus on the game. The signal/node pattern suits puzzle UI really well: grid cells, candles, hint overlays all compose as independent nodes talking via signals.

Android export was straightforward once the SDK and build template settings were dialled in. First AAB upload to Play Console took longer than the engine export itself.

What Godot handled brilliantly

UI responsiveness with Container nodes across varying phone aspect ratios

Save/load through FileAccess, no third-party plugin needed

Tween for every animation: candle placement, light sweep, chapter transitions, menu fades

Audio buses for a clean SFX / music / ambient split with persisted volumes

Where I had to roll my own

Save migration system with version-stamped files and migration scripts, since the save format kept changing during alpha

Puzzle solver as a Python backtracking tool outside the game that validates every puzzle has exactly one solution before it ships. Not Godot-related but part of the toolchain.

Candle flame flicker and warm glow, hand-animated in GDScript after a few rounds of fighting AnimationPlayer

Numbers

About a year of solo dev

145 hand-crafted rooms

50 MB install

19 testers through closed alpha

30 bugs reported, all fixed

0 bytes of personal data collected or transmitted

Free to download. £2.49 one-time unlock for the full game. No ads, no subscription, no accounts, no analytics. The entire game runs on-device.

Happy to answer anything about shipping with Godot, Play Console flow, solo dev workflow, or the puzzle generation side.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.karlsmith.candlewise

Trailer: https://youtube.com/shorts/d9l73CuEHbo

Think warm.

Hi puzzle folks,

Candlewise is a cosy take on Akari (Light Up). Place candles in a grid so every white cell is lit, no two candles see each other along a row or column, and numbered walls have exactly that many adjacent candles. 145 hand-crafted rooms across 5 chapters, grids from 5×5 to 13×13. No ads, no timers, no ambushes. One-time £2.49 unlocks everything at launch.

I've just pushed v1.33 to closed alpha on Google Play. It needs 12 active testers before Google will let me graduate to production. I'm not far off but still short of the benchmark.

If you fancy joining: https://karlsmith.design/candlewise

A few full-game unlock codes are still going out to people who sign up now in exchange for a bit of feedback. Once those run out you can still join the alpha; the first chapter is always free.

Happy to answer any questions in the comments.

Thanks all

Karl