'Luminids' is a 3D colony simulation game being developed in Godot by a solo developer based in Cambridge, UK. It follows tiny luminous creatures as they hatch, grow, and form relationships with one another in a single persistent world.
The character cognition technology built during development has expanded into a separate AI company, LuminidsAI, and a framework dubbed 'Contextual Relational Intelligence (CRI)'. While the game manages events occurring in the world, CRI maintains what each character sees, remembers, and believes as an individual state. It is designed so that even when experiencing the same event, differing information and experiences across characters lead to distinct decisions and actions.
Currently, 'Luminids' features a foundational architecture supporting character identities that persist across saves and loads, character-specific experience logs, and expressions based on individual history. Shared relational history, reactions based on character-specific evidence and beliefs, and expectation states modified by experience are currently being validated in the development environment.
The planned CRI platform will consist of an engine that maintains character identities, memories, beliefs, relationships, and expectations, along with state-inspection and authoring tools, as well as scenario reproduction and intervention testing features. Large language models such as GPT and Claude are connected for expression and reasoning as needed, while long-term character histories and states are maintained outside the model.
A causal testing feature has also been proposed, allowing developers to remove a specific belief and rerun the same scenario to see if the reaction changes. This enables developers to verify whether memories, beliefs, or relational states functioned as the actual cause of a change in behavior.
According to the developer, 'Luminids' has accumulated over 30 million views across social media, over 30,000 followers, and 295,000 visits to its Steam store page. A total of 958 players participated in its recent playtest. LuminidsAI is currently preparing to raise a £1.5 million pre-seed investment round to separate and expand CRI into a developer platform that other game studios can also utilize.
