Monday 24 October 2011

Resurrected Post: Luminesca Evolved

I removed this post last year, and decided to re-post it for the sake of completeness. It has a new date stamp now, but you can see from the comments' date stamps that it's quite old! Ahh, those were the days.

Luminesca is now, of course, a fully-fledged project in development.

Original post:
I've been toying with the idea of an updated Luminesca game, and came up with this mock-up screenshot. All comments and criticism are more than welcome! 
lum,luminesca

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds like a great idea if you ask me.

I like the mock-up, the clear foreground suggests a more organic landscape than the original and the blurred background suggests depth. Maybe get a bit of parallax scrolling going on?;-)

One thing I would say is that the main character's light seems to illuminate all around and not towards the front as I would expect from the way it's hanging, and it makes the character look pasted on top of the background (But I get that this is just a quick mock-up!). In any case, maybe it's preferable to be able to see the whole character anyway=)

I like the tentacley-plant things (the technical term..), though maybe they could be a bit smoother - I say *maybe* because they actually look brittle the way they're drawn right now, which could be interesting..

All right now i'm just nit-picking. Good work, I hereby give a remake the green light=)

Matt said...

The idea of the light was really to give Lum a faint white outline that helps him stand out from the dark backgrounds. You're right though, it really should be cast forwards a bit more.

The plants were drawn with a mouse because I was too lazy to go and plug in my tablet, which is why they're a bit jagged rather than curvy.

If this ever saw the light of day I think vector graphics would be best, as I imagine camera zooming on certain details would be nice. Think LocoRoco.

Anonymous said...

Yeah I could see the Loco Roco influences. A dark, surreal Loco Roco mind=)

The light itself was a really good idea, I remember you mentioning it during your design phase. Maybe it could find its way into the gameplay? I'm thinking an attract/scare mechanic, something along the lines of the co-op interactions in the early Abe games. I think you may have suggested something like that before..

Oh and why not have the light bouncing up and down as you walk - you know, just for the hell of it! - Anyway, good luck;-)

Matt said...

That's pretty much exactly what I had in mind! The light was to be part of the core gameplay mechanics, I just simplified it a lot for the Director game.