Tale of a Darkened World

Decades ago, titanic obsidian monoliths rained down from the sky with a thunderous impact. A raging tempest of unfathomable darkness gathered around them, slowly crawling across the world and consuming all in its path. I am the ruler of this land, once mighty and resolute, now broken and wounded, but not defeated. I will reclaim the realm and bring back light to the world.  After years of wander, I finally found the Lucor, a mystical creature able to radiate a powerful enough brightness to dissipate darkness. It is time to explore the shadows and rebuild my empire. 

Introduction

Welcome to this first episode of my devlog series about my minimalist survival city-builder game, Lueur. In Lueur, you will establish several cities and ensure their survival against many dangers. The game plays in semi-real time on a classic squared grid. As you might have guessed from the intro, it is setup in a medieval-fantasy world filled with chivalry and magic.

In this first episode I will talk about how the game is born, what influenced its creation, and what are the game's core ideas and mechanics. Feel free to watch the video format instead.

The origins of the game

From AAA to indie

I got a video game school degree in France and worked for 3 years at Ubisoft on the Ghost Recon and Assasin's Creed franchises. I left one year ago to make my own games and become a solo indie game developer. I created a first very small game called Last In Space. It was a simple arcade strategy SHMUP with strong retro vibes. I did not win millions, but it paid the bills and that's already great. I quickly moved on to Lueur after that. 

The Lowrezjam and the different inspiration

I am strongly fueled by 4x and other city-builder games like Civilization, Endless Legend, Frostpunk and many others. A small game called "the settlers" inspired the idea the most though. It is an experimental very minimalist city-builder with no specific goal other than discovering what you can actually do and build something cool. This idea stuck with me and became an essential part of Lueur. Most things are not told, you discover by yourself while playing. The first version of the game was made during the lowrezjam. It is a competition where you have two weeks to create a game within a 64x64 resolution. At the time I just thought it would be fun to try and create a city-builder in such a tiny resolution. It was incredibly challenging but it planted the seeds for what would become Lueur.

The game received good reviews, and I decided to work a few more months to make a small commercial game out of it. While developing it though, I realized I could do something more important with it, and decided to scale up the scope of the game.

Game's Core Pillars and Objectives

1. Minimalist: find the least amount of things needed to build the experience I'm looking for.
2. Easy to understand: Easy enough to be able to play it even without a tutorial
3. Designed for handheld console: I really people to be able to chill wherever they want while playing Lueur
4. Cozy city-builder, but challenging survival
5. Short sessions: a Lueur game session should be about the length of a netflix episode

What's a "minimalist" game

Let me explain a little bit more what I mean by Minimalist game. Minimalism is a way of life that can be interpreted in different ways. But for me it's about removing anything unnecessary from your life. Each thing you do or own must have a clear purpose and ultimately provide you with happiness. It really helped me during a time of depression and left a strong imprint on me that I really want to use in my games. So when I want to make a Minimalist game, I don't imply to make an abstract game with geometry shapes as visuals. It is about finding the minimal amount of stuff needed to get to the experience I wish to deliver. The smaller amounts of mechanics needed, the smaller amount of visual details needed, the smaller amount of information on screen needed and so on and so forth.The game is done not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to remove (sorry I don't remember who said that). Chess or Go are extreme examples of minimalist games.

But I need to be very careful that minimalism does not make the game harder to understand. I might not be able to keep everything minimal, but I think it's an important mindset to have.

Game Mechanics And Systems

Let's quickly describe everything you can do in the game.

• Build structures: But you can't just build them randomly. You want to understand how to build specific buildings on specific terrains. How buildings work and interact with the world. How to make their production as efficient as possible in the tight space you have.

• Interact with the game world directly: Chop down a forest to collect materials and make room for more buildings. Find a treasure and enjoy its reward or destroy a gigantic obsidian monolith. Some of these actions are actually done by playing small mini-games just like you would do in farming sims like Stardew Valley for example.

• Explore: In Lueur space is scarce. The world is plunged into darkness, and to make more room you'll need to explore and illuminate the land using your limited Light resource. Darkness is also the first way you can loose. If your main camp is washed away by a darkness storm, it's game over so be careful!

• Decide: Sometimes, random events will happen in your land. It can happen anytime and will usually ask you to make strategic and tough moral choices to be able to survive.

Outro

Thank you for reading till the end. In the next episodes I will focus on more specific subjects like the balancing of the game, how I added story into the game, how I market the game and tons of cool stuff like that. Make sure to be subscribed to not miss the next episode. Also, let me know what you think in the comments! If you are interested in following along the development each week, you can take a look at my weekly updates. If you'd like to support me, you can do so on Ko-fi. See you next time!