Farol is a two-person game studio in Tallinn, and Last Light is its first game: a lighthouse on a rock in a snowstorm, and a keeper who has to keep the lamp burning until morning. The studio asked me for everything that would sit around the game at launch, from the title lettering to the posters on the harbour wall.

Lettering on the sprite grid

The title is drawn on the same 8 px grid as the game’s sprites, so it sits in the menus without looking pasted on. In print it only ever grows by whole numbers, two, four or sixteen times, so every pixel stays square.

The same rule made the enamel pin: one lighthouse sprite, cut in metal at pin size.

A kit for 300 people

Three weeks before launch, Farol sent 300 preview kits to press and streamers. Each went out in a yellow mailer, the colour of the lamp in the game and the easiest thing to spot in a pile of post. Inside were:

• A sheet of pixel stickers drawn from the game’s sprites.

• A keeper’s pass on a lanyard, the in-game ID card made real.

• The lighthouse enamel pin.

• A card with a store key and a few lines from the studio.

The passes were the surprise. Several streamers wore theirs on camera for their first evening of play, which did more for the launch than the press release.

Posters, screens and a beanie

The key art is one wide picture of the lighthouse in the storm, made to crop three ways: wide for the store page and a backlit panel in a station, tall for posters, square for the game’s icon. In launch week we pasted 40 posters along the harbour wall and framed one for the studio.

I checked the art on a laptop, a desk monitor and a living-room television, because that is where people would meet it. On two of the three the darkest blues swallowed the lighthouse, so they were lifted a few steps.

The shop sells a navy beanie and an enamel mug with the Farol mark. The first run of 150 of each sold out, which for a studio of two counts as a merchandise department.