Lumins and Shades is a cute 2D grid-based puzzle game about turning on lights and making memories. Work together with Lumins, who live in light, and Shades, who live in darkness, to bring light to the world.
Guide them to discover and solve puzzles, in which they interact with various kinds of light switches, each other, and even the light and darkness itself. Puzzles start simple but eventually become very complex, as different solutions have effects on the world and other puzzles.
Lumins and Shades is the kind of puzzle game that does not directly spell out its mechanics, but instead allows the player to experiment and discover them on their own.
The game is fairly long, containing around 150 puzzles (depending on how you count them) across 11 areas, and a handful of deeper challenges for those who seek them out.
Lumins and Shades can be played using mouse, keyboard, game controller, or any combination of these you like. All controls are remappable.
The game runs on WIndows. While no longer currently planned, if the game does well enough, other platforms are not out of the question.
Despite the puzzles' apparent reliance on color, the game is fully playable by anyone with color perception difficulties, since all switches and lights are labeled with their color, and light boundaries are clearly outlined. In addition there are options for game brightness, character outline colors, and a color mode which makes greens and reds slightly more distinct.
Lumins and Shades was developed by TheOnlyOne, who came up with the game concept, did the puzzle design, programming, character design, and writing, and made the font, sound effects, and music.
Jazz created the environment tiles, improved character design and animation, graphical UI elements, and the title logo.
I started development of Lumins and Shades around August 2016, having come up with the idea about a year earlier. Here is a twitter thread detailing about half a year of the game's early development history. The game's official Twitter account continues to give development updates until bit after the release of the demo in June 2017. (The demo is no longer available.) After this, development of the game slowed down significantly as I became more busy and less motivated, but the main things done during the next few years were: the composition of the soundtrack, the incorporation of Jazz's greatly improved graphical assets, and the continual and repeated trimming and refinement of the puzzles. The game was finally released on October 27, 2023.
The ideas for this game didn't come out of nowhere. Some of the core mechanics, such as the selection and commanding of multiple characters as well as the various types of light switches, are based on a lovely old PC game called Gruntz (Monolith Productions, 1999), which was one of my favorite games from my childhood and is easily still one of my favorites. The puzzle design mentality is heavily influenced by more recent (at the time of inception) games such as The Witness (Thekla, Inc., 2016) and Stephen's Sausage Roll (Increpare Games, 2016).
Since around the time of release, this was a hot topic: Lumins and Shades is not created in any particular engine, but rather is written in C using the SDL library for graphics, audio, and controls. It uses libopenmpt to play music.
The Lumins and Shades soundtrack consists of relaxing and mysterious chiptunes. The soundtrack can be purchased on Steam (Browser Link | Steam Desktop Client). The full soundtrack is also available for free on YouTube.
In Lumins and Shades, the characters have numerous possible hair styles and colors, they can wear glasses (shades!), and have many other possible visual differences. Each time you start a puzzle, the appearance of each character is randomized, and when there are multiple characters, they are chosen to be different so that you can more easily keep track of which is which.
On the Character Creator Page, you can play around with the different appearances, and also export them as images, to use as a profile picture, for example.
If you have any questions about the game or find something wrong with the site feel free to contact me.
