Lumen | Game Details

The World & Mechanics

Narrative Driven Investigation

Lumin casts you as Aquilo, a young man whose college commute turns into an impossible, decades-long journey after waking up in a desolate landscape that bears little resemblance to home.

Clue Gathering: The heart of the game lies in its conversational mechanics. Every line of dialogue is a potential clue to piece together the events that destroyed civilization.
Mission System: Progress is heavily driven by conversational outcomes. NPCs provide essential tasks that unlock new areas, reveal deep lore, and directly impact Aquilo’s core objective.

🎮 Play the Prototype

Team Collaboration & Art Pipeline

Bringing Lumen's 2D world to life required close cross-disciplinary teamwork to ensure environmental fidelity matched the narrative tone.

Cross-Discipline Teamwork: Collaborated directly with 2D artists and animators to integrate asset packs, character sprites, and environmental animations cleanly into the engine.
Asset Pipeline: Standardized sprite imports and structural configurations to maintain crisp visual quality across various display aspect ratios.

Tech Art: 2D Wind Shader

Vertex Displacement & Atmosphere

To give the post-apocalyptic 2D environments an organic, breathing feel without relying on expensive physical simulations, I implemented a custom vertex wind shader.

Procedural Noise: Driven by a Gradient Noise node combined with Time and Speed parameters to generate rolling foliage sway.
UV Masking: Split UV coordinates to create a vertical gradient mask, ensuring the roots/bases of environmental assets remain firmly anchored while the tops sway freely.
GPU Optimization: Calculations run entirely on the GPU via vertex position offsets, ensuring zero CPU overhead.

LLM Chat & Systems

Dynamic API Integration

To support truly unpredictable conversations, I engineered a fully interactive NPC chat system from scratch by integrating Google's Gemini API directly into the game engine.

Generative Dialogue & Voice: NPCs feature AI-generated dialogue paired with real-time voice implementation, ensuring every playthrough and conversation is unique and responsive.
Asynchronous Architecture: The backend pipeline handles secure web requests and parses complex JSON responses asynchronously, preventing the main thread from stalling during gameplay.
Dynamic UI Binding: The parsed response data seamlessly drives the in-game UI, populating dialogue boxes and providing fluid player-to-AI conversational loops.