- The next Luminids playtest is coming! Existing testers will regain access - 13 September 2026
Thank You for Playing the first Luminids Playtest!A huge thank you to everyone who took part in the first Luminids Playtest. Your time, feedback, bug reports, and experiences with the game are incredibly valuable to us as we continue improving Luminids. This playtest has now ended, but we’re already working on what comes next. Stay tuned fo playest #2 very soon! Thanks again for being part of the journey. 💙— The Luminids Team
- Luminids playtest is now live! - 17 August 2026
The new Luminids playtest build is live 🌱Another build is out in the wild. There’s been a lot of work going into polish, fixes, world feel and all the little details that make Luminids feel more alive. It’s still a playtest, so expect rough edges. That’s exactly why I want you in there. Explore. Build. Meet some tiny weirdos. Get lost. Break things. And most importantly, tell me what feels good, what doesn’t, and what you want more of. Every bit of feedback helps me get closer to the game I’ve had in my head all this time. Thanks again to everyone testing and following the journey. 💚 Much love from Nick! See you in the world.
- June Dev Log: A Colony That Feels Something - 21 June 2026
The creatures carry the heart of itFrom behaviour to feelingA while back I wrote about how the Luminids think.In Dev Log 8: How Luminids Think I walked through the behaviour model. Three quiet axes underneath each creature. Work Drive, Boldness, and Sociability. That was the part that decided what a Luminid would do, and why one would wander off to tinker while another stayed close to the group.That work gave them behaviour.This stretch was about something harder to name. It was about giving them feeling.Behaviour is a creature acting. Feeling is a creature that seems to be having a moment, and that lets you have one too. I kept coming back to a simple test. When you look at a Luminid, does anything look back?For a long time the honest answer was not really.So that became the work.Moods you can readThe first thing I wanted was a creature you could read without a menu.A Luminid can be ca…
- May Dev Log: The Build System, Rebuilt - 21 June 2026
What the rebuilt tools are really for: a place that feels lived inBuilding in Luminids was powerful, and it fought you the whole way.You could place blocks. You could carve and stack and fill. On paper it could do a lot.But there was a quiet gap between what the tools could do and what you actually wanted to make.You had a picture in your head. A little cottage. A fence around the garden. A path that runs home through the grass.And the tools handed you a wall of abstract shapes, fiddly placement, and a ghost preview you could barely read.So you ended up building what the system made easy instead of building what you imagined. That is exactly backwards from what this game is supposed to be about.This one took a while to admit. The build system was not broken. It was just pointed at the wrong goal.What building should actually feel likeBefore I touched a single tool, I wrote down the nort…
- Luminids Kickstarter Campaign - 14 May 2026
Please follow and support our Kickstarter - it only takes a few seconds and means the world to helping support Luminids and bring it to the world. :) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/luminids/luminids-a-calm-colony-building-journey
- April Dev Log 5: Building Luminids in Godot 4.6 - 6 April 2026
Building Luminids in Godot has given me a real appreciation for open source tools and the indie community around them.There’s still a long way to go, but a lot of Luminids now exists in playable form. The core world, creature, building, progression, and atmosphere systems are all starting to come together. Systems now in placeWorldSeeded voxel world generationBiome-driven environmentsWater systemsDay/night, lighting, and weatherSimulationLuminid behaviour systemsWildlife systemsReactivity and physical feedbackPlayer & ProgressionFirst-person player controllerBuilding and placementCrafting and progressionQuest and story structureSave/load and world continuity Building Emergent AI with GodotFor a deeper breakdown of this system, see Dev Log 8: How Luminids Think.Each Luminid runs the same core behaviour model built around three axes: Work Drive, Boldness, and Sociability. Those values shi…
- March Dev Log 4: The Evolution of Luminids - 10 March 2026
The Evolution of the LuminidsFrom prototype entity to something that feels like a companion. Early creature protoypes were to prove that the systems worked. From there we began our iteration.refining proportionsadjusting scale so they felt grounded in the worldsmoothing animation so motion felt naturaldeveloping the simple faceplate that now gives them their expressionsOver time those small changes stacked up. Gradually the Luminids stopped feeling like objects and started feeling like characters. That shift changed a lot of design decisions going forward. If the Luminids were going to feel like living beings, the world around them needed to support that feeling.The evolution of the worldFrom flat grid to a place with rhythm and depth. The early world was what you would expect from a prototype: flat terrain, hard edges, and lighting that made things visible. From there the development f…
- February Dev Log 3: A Sky That Carries the World - 21 February 2026
IntroductionClouds, lighting, and the day night cycle are not purely decorative layers in Luminids. They are part of the world’s underlying rhythm, and when they feel unstable, everything below them feels slightly off.The goal was not to create standout moments like dramatic sunsets or heavy contrast. It was to make the sky behave consistently and predictably so the world feels calm, readable, and alive as time passes. How the sky system worksThe sky is now treated as a continuous progression rather than a set of states.The sky is not a collection of separate effects. It is one continuous system that updates every frame and keeps everything in sync: time of day, sun position, cloud motion, fog, and atmosphere.At the center is a “Sky System” controller. It owns the clock, pushes a unified time value into shaders, and gently blends all other sky parameters toward their targets so nothing…
- January Dev Log 2: How Luminids Think - Designing an Emergent System - 20 January 2026
How Luminids Think - Designing an Emergent SystemI wanted to write this dev log to explain how Luminids actually work under the hood.A lot of recent development has focused on their “brains”. Not AI in the buzzword sense, but the structure that decides what a Luminid does, who they gravitate toward, and how they change over time.Two Luminids can face the same task and respond differently - one heads straight in, another lingers, watches, and follows later. The core ideaEvery Luminid uses the same internal structure, expressed through three behavioural axes.These axes shape how they approach the world and shift gradually over time. Together, the three axes combine into a wide range of personalities, and the behaviour you see is just those mixes playing out over time.In theory, there are infinite mixes. Here are a few examples: Key: ↑ high, ↗ medium, ↓ lowThese mixes influence how Luminid…
- January Dev Log: Harvesting & Inventory - 11 January 2026
What “harvesting” actually means in LuminidsThe goal is to have Luminids notice resources, decide to gather them, carry them somewhere, and then use them for the next thing, with this: the world changes.We are not aiming for a survival grind.Harvesting in Luminids is closer to gentle world-tending. You shape the space, place a few incentives, and the Luminids respond. The loop is meant to feel:legible, so you can usually see what is about to happensoft, without frantic micromanagementalive, because they make choices rather than just follow ordersThe goal is not pressure. It is momentum. Inventory: small pockets, big effectsThe inventory system is minimal on purpose.Luminids have a small number of slots.Each slot holds a single resource type.Stacks have a cap, so storage actually matters.This does two things straight away.First, hauling becomes a real activity rather than a teleport. Sec…
- December Dev Log: Building and Animating the Luminids - 29 December 2025
Hey folks - i'll do these dev logs monthly, stay tuned for more content. For this one, the focus was on the actual creation of the Luminids themselves. Model work, rigging, animation tests, and trying to lock down how these creatures look and move in the game. This is the first time Luminids have started to feel like real characters instead of placeholder blobs. Defining the Luminid ShapeLuminids are simple silhouettes, so small adjustments matter more than you’d think. A smoother head curve, slightly wider base, shorter arms. Everything changes the personality.The goal was to find a balance between:readable at small sizesexpressive in motioneasy to animatedistinctive without extra detailIt was solved by keeping the body a single unified mesh with soft, rounded forms. No harsh angles. No complexity. The simplicity actually forced better decision-making. Rigging the First LuminidOnce the…
- The Luminids Steam page is live - 17 December 2025
🌱 Luminids is now live on SteamLuminids is a cozy world-building and exploration game where you guide small beings of light as they grow, build, and evolve across a living voxel world.After a long period of quiet development, the Steam page is now live.If you enjoy thoughtful, creative games focused on emergence, atmosphere, and watching worlds come alive over time, you can wishlist Luminids today and follow along as development continues. 🎮 Planned for Early Access in 2026 👉 Wishlist on Steam Thank you for being here at the beginning and helping to support - it means the world to me! A new dawn is upon us! :)
