From behaviour to feeling
Back in Dev Log 8: How Luminids Think I wrote about the behaviour side: three axes under each Luminid, Work Drive, Boldness and Sociability. That’s what decided 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 pin down, which is feelings.
I kept coming back to one test. When you look at a Luminid, does anything look back? For a long time the honest answer was not really.
Moods you can read
The first thing I wanted was a creature you could read without opening a menu.
A Luminid can be calm, happy or excited. You can tell which from how it holds itself and from the small bubble above its head, and its name plate spells it out in one word. No numbers.
The colony has a mood as well. The bar along the top of the screen tells you whether the camp as a whole is content or unsettled.
The HUD mostly stays out of it. The most it does is slip in a small line like “a calm moment, maybe check in on someone.” That’s a nudge, not an alarm.
I’m strict about this because the moods are how the game tells you who might need you, so they have to stay small and easy to read. I’d much rather you learn to read a Luminid than a spreadsheet.
Stopping to care
Once you can see how a Luminid is doing, you want to be able to do something about it. So now you can.
Here’s the moment from the screenshot below. It’s early on the first morning. The bar at the top says the colony is content and suggests checking in on someone. Luna is floating right in front of you, name plate reading Calm, and the prompt says “Care for Luna.” You press the key, kneel, give Luna a bit of attention, and get on with your day.
There’s no care meter to drain and refill, and it isn’t a chore you have to tick off. You do it because the Luminid in front of you looked like it could use it.
The part I most wanted to get right is what happens after you walk away. The care isn’t used up. Luna keeps it.
Memory, and the first bonds
Luna holds onto it because of a layer under the moods that you never see directly.
When something happens to a Luminid, it doesn’t just flash up and disappear. It leaves a mark, and that mark shapes what comes after.
Relationships grow out of the same thing. Luminids form bonds with each other. They react to who’s nearby and drift toward the ones they know, and over time the group stops looking like a handful of creatures who happen to share a field.
One small phrase carried a lot of this work: a colony, not a crowd. A crowd is a lot of things in the same place. A colony has history together, and would notice if one of them was missing. That was the real goal.
Astra, the one who wakes with you
Astra is the first Luminid you meet. You wake up in the dark at the start of the game, and so does she.
She doesn’t arrive with a speech or a quest log. She introduces herself as “a light-born guide” and tells you she “just woke up too.”
I wrote her that way on purpose. She isn’t above you. She’s new here as well, a little unsure, working things out alongside you.
That makes her the emotional anchor of the first hour. The moods, the care and the bonds all reach you through Astra first, so if she comes across as a real character, the rest of the colony has a much better chance.
Little personalities
What I didn’t plan for was how much character leaks out once these systems are running together.
A few of them have names now: Astra, Luna, Elu, Larch. Saying the names out loud changed how I thought about them, which I didn’t expect.
Then some quirks turned up on their own:
- one Luminid does a little dance when it’s happy. I never scripted that. It just fell out of the systems lining up
- another is a homebody and never strays far from camp
- the camp dog turned out the same way, and keeps near the fire and near you
None of these are big features. But they’re how you start telling individuals apart, and once you can, the field isn’t full of Luminids any more. It’s full of the ones you know.
Why the creatures come first
I’ve written a lot of dev logs about the world: the voxels, the water, the light at dusk. But the world is there for the Luminids, not the other way round.
This stretch is the closest I’ve come to passing that test from the start, where you look at a Luminid and something looks back.
What comes next
A few things I want to do next:
- turn a handful of Luminids into recurring faces you remember between sessions
- keep deepening how they remember, so care and bonds last longer
- give the colony more of the small ways of reacting to you that make Astra work
As it turned out, the next big job was replacing the machinery underneath all of this. That story is in Dev Log 17.
Nick
