Fix Stories: Games Don’t Always Need to Ask More From Us

Why Nicholas Jacob Is Building Luminids as Somewhere Players Can Simply Visit

Fix Stories gives developers room to tell the stories behind their work directly in their own words. In this contribution, solo developer Nicholas Jacob explains why he began building Luminids around smaller stakes, familiar places, and the idea that a game can give players something without constantly asking for more in return.

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Luminids — “One Light” gameplay trailer

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The story below was submitted by Nicholas Jacob and is published in his own words.

Games don’t always need to ask more from us

I started making Luminids because I wanted to build somewhere I would actually want to spend time.

A lot of games are brilliant at giving us things to chase. Bigger numbers, better gear, another objective, another battle, another thing to optimise. I love games like that too, but at some point I started wondering whether a game could give you something without constantly asking for something back.

That became quite an important idea for Luminids:

Games don’t always need to ask more from us.

Sometimes it should be enough to wander somewhere beautiful, build something because you like the way it looks, sit beside a lake, or watch a tiny creature you’ve known since it hatched grow into its own little person.

That was really the beginning of the game.

Luminids are small beings of light. They hatch, grow up, make friends, develop personalities and relationships, find things they like doing, and gradually make a home in the world around them.

You help shape that world from above, building homes, paths and eventually whole colonies. But you can also step down into first person and live inside the same place you’ve been building.

That second part matters a lot to me.

I didn’t want the colony to just be numbers moving around on a screen. I wanted you to be able to walk through it afterwards. To recognise the little house you placed earlier. To see Luminids going about their lives. To find one you’ve become attached to and wonder what they’ve been doing.

I think that’s where the heart of the game is.

I’ve been building Luminids largely on my own for about a year now, and inevitably the game has changed a lot along the way.

There have been plenty of ideas that sounded wonderful and then didn’t work at all. Systems I’ve rebuilt. Things I’ve cut. Days spent fixing something nobody playing the game will ever know existed.

There are also moments where something tiny suddenly makes the whole thing feel alive.

A Luminid turning to look at another one. A group gathering around a fire at night. Seeing a village lit up from a distance. Walking through somewhere that, a few months earlier, existed only as an idea in my head.

Those moments keep me going.

The strange thing about building a calm game is that making one isn’t always particularly calm.

Solo development can be intense. There is always another system to build, another bug, another piece of art, another decision. You can spend hundreds of hours working on something players might experience in a few minutes.

But I think that has also made me more protective of what Luminids is supposed to be.

I don’t want to fill the game with mechanics just because games are expected to have them. There doesn’t need to be combat because games normally have combat. There doesn’t need to be punishment for putting the controller down. There doesn’t need to be some enormous threat hanging over everything to justify the player’s time.

The stakes can be smaller:

A new home.

A friendship.

A creature being born.

A colony slowly becoming somewhere that feels familiar.

My hope is that people eventually open Luminids because they want to visit.

Maybe they build for an hour. Maybe they follow the story. Maybe they just wander around their village at sunset and see what everybody is doing.

And when they leave, I hope the game hasn’t made them feel exhausted or behind.

I hope it feels like spending a little time somewhere kind.

That, more than anything, is what I’ve been trying to build.

Luminids

Release: Early Access planned for February 2027

Genre: Cozy colony-building sandbox

Developer / Publisher: Luminids Studios

Platforms: PC via Steam

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Fix Gaming Channel: Fix Stories gives developers and creators room to tell the stories behind their work in their own words. Nicholas Jacob’s submitted story above has been preserved and formatted for publication by Fix Gaming Channel.

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