Luminids

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Latest news

• Announcements·17 Aug 2026Official

  Luminids playtest is now live!

  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.
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• Announcements·21 Jun 2026Official

  June Dev Log: A Colony That Feels Something

  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 calm, happy, or excited. You see it in how it carries itself and in the small bubble it lifts above its head. You do not need a number. You glance over, and you just know how it is doing.The colony has its own weather too. As a group it reads as content or unsettled, and you feel that before you can explain it.The HUD does not lecture you about any of this. It whispers. A small line will drift in like “a calm moment, maybe check in on someone.” It is a nudge, not an alarm.That restraint is the whole point. In Luminids the atmosphere is how the world talks to you, and emotion is never just decoration sitting on top of the systems. It is the signal. So I keep the feelings small and legible, never a wall of stats shoved in your face.Moods you can read at a glanceA colony, not a crowdStopping to careOnce a Luminid can show you how it feels, you want to be able to do something about it.So you can stop and care for one. In game it is as plain as pressing a key to care for a single Luminid by name. “Care for Luna.” You kneel into the moment, you give it a little attention, and then you carry o...
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• Announcements·21 Jun 2026Official

  May Dev Log: The Build System, Rebuilt

  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 north star.Building in Luminids should be easy to start. Forgiving when you get it wrong. Warm enough that you want to keep going.You should be able to build a house. You should be able to build a bridge. Not after an hour of fighting menus, but in the natural flow of being in the world.And it should never feel like a solo menu you operate off in a corner by yourself.This is a game about a little colony of glowing creatures who live with you. Building should feel like something you do together with them, not a spreadsheet you fill in alone.That last part became the rule I measured everything else against.If a change made the colony feel more present in the act of building, it stayed. If it made building feel more like operating software, it went.Being ruthless about the cutThe fastest way to make the tools feel like the world was to throw a lot of them away.I cut the abstract shapes almost nobody was really reaching for. The dome, the spire, the pillar, the ring. They were clever, and they were noise.Then I folded the overlap together.the plain block tool melted into the brushthe replace ...
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• Announcements·14 May 2026Official

  Luminids Kickstarter Campaign

  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
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• Announcements·6 Apr 2026Official

  April Dev Log 5: Building Luminids in Godot 4.6

  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 shift over time through repeated actions, environment, and social context.The goal is behaviour that feels readable and consistent rather than random. When a Luminid changes how it acts, it should feel like an emergent result of what it has experienced, not a scripted flip.Players influence this indirectly by shaping the world, deciding where work happens, and choosing when to intervene versus when to observe. Want to chat?If you’d like to chat about Godot, emergent systems, or Luminids, come say hello on Discord.Find me as Zilos on Discord, always happy to riff on all things game dev and what’s gone into the world of Luminids so far. What comes nextNext up is more cohesion, better feel, expanded content, and continued work towards a stronger public demo. There’s still plenty to do, but the shape of the game is getting clearer with every pass. Nick
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