Lumina
Lumina is a 48-hour jam game about escaping a catacomb with an aura of light as your only life force, built for the 3rd Alakajam on the theme "Always Growing," and the team's first project combining Unity with git.
The Team
- Riley Clarke · Programmer / 3D Modeling / Project Management
- Scott Foey · Designer
- Stephen Ogbeiwi · Designer
- Tom Broughton · Artist
Alongside programming and some of the 3D modelling, I managed the project across the 48 hours and taught the rest of the team the git basics they needed to work alongside me, since this was the team's first time combining Unity with proper version control.
Light as Life Force
The player controls Lumina, trying to find the exit out of a set of catacombs while an aura of light around them constantly depletes. Light crystals scattered through the levels top the aura back up, but the core tension comes from the enemies: they're invisible in darkness and drain light fast on contact, so retreating into the dark to avoid them costs you the resource you need to survive it. Players can trigger a light pulse to reveal more of the map, at the cost of burning through the aura even faster: there's no way to see everything and stay safe at the same time.
Designing Around Retreat
We leaned into atmosphere over combat: there's no way to fight back against an enemy that catches you, so the only real strategy is avoidance and retreat. That constraint shaped the whole level design: darkness needed to feel genuinely threatening rather than just an aesthetic choice, since it's the thing directly working against the resource keeping the player alive.
Post-Jam Reflection
We ran into the usual first-time git problems (merge conflicts and Unity meta file headaches) but got through them, which was really the point: this jam doubled as practice for collaborating on our final year university project the same way. Reception was slightly good to mediocre; players felt the theme wasn't fully nailed and some found the trial-and-error pacing frustrating, but the run itself did what we needed it to do for the team's git and Unity workflow going forward.
Lumina is playable on itch.io, with the full source and the Alakajam entry both up for anyone who wants to dig further.