Lustrous Spirit - Postmortem

Development on Lustrous Spirit just ended. how did it go and what can be learned from it?

Recap

Lustrous Spirit began in the summer of 2021. I had recently decided to learn Unreal, and after following an Unreal 101 tutorial I created another test project to experiment and follow other tutorials in. This garish test project would eventually turn into Lustrous Spirit.

I suppose at some point during July of that summer I learned about landscape tools and wanted to try them out - why not learn them by making the houseki no kuni island which I was somewhat familiar with? I quickly sculpted the basic form of the island and excitedly thought about what a game that takes place on the houseki island might be. Not too long before I had 3D modeled the houseki school building and hosted it on a website, as a way of letting people understand the confusing layout of the school. I thought something similar might be nice for the island as well! A game where you can explore the island and understand where various scenes in the anime take place.

During this time, I was sharing progress mostly with my housemates at the time, and on a small houseki discord server. Mostly though I was just having fun making art and learning new tools. After summer 2021, I stopped working on the project as university began again - this would be my busiest school year and I would not touch Lustrous Spirit (at the time called 'HousekiUE5') for quite some time. At some point in fall of 2022 I must have resumed work though because on November 13, 2022, I made my first public post about the game (now actually called 'Lustrous Spirit') including a video and download link.

Despite how simple it looked, people seemed to enjoy it a lot! My tweet gained a ton of likes (by my standards at the time) and I was very excited. The 1.0 version of Lustrous Spirit only had 20 memories, a singlar time of day, and crapload of the exact same grass model. There is something charming about its simplicity though. Anyway, while it was cool that people liked the game, the game also clearly had a ton of problems - the feedback came flooding in. No settings menu, the world felt empty, people's computers can't run it (admittedly still a big issue), but most importantly memory cutscenes were not loading - that was the main gameplay feature! I compiled everyone's feedback, and over the next week I spent much time fixing the game, and quickly released a patched version of the game.

One important change in the patched version was the addition of global illumination. At some point during fall 2022 I had upgraded Lustrous Spirit to the newly released Unreal 5, and finally decided to turn on GI - which was literally just checking a box. The interior of the school suddenly looked much nicer, so I posted another video for the 'patch released' tweet highlighting the school interior. This one gained even more attention, which is nice since the game was now much less glitchy.

All of the attention Lustrous Spirit was getting was quite motivating. However, I wasn't really sure what to do next. Several online and IRL friends who liked houseki reached out and said they would be interested in helping too - but I wasn't yet ready to organize a group. Shortly after the patch I brainstormed, contemplated, and wrote a new design document for the game.

These couple weeks of design planning outlined the scope and systems for the rest of the game.

- The passage of time and day cycle
- Gem collection, carving, and uses
- The encyclopedia as a menu
- Lustrous-like movement
- Other guiding ideas behind gameplay

I wanted Lustrous Spirit to be both a tool for exploring world of houseki, and to simulate the experience of being a lustrous.

The following winter and spring I did a lot of work on gameplay. A game about the crystal people felt a little lacking without crystals, so I made a gemstone shader and the gem carving system (which mostly exists because I wanted to try making a 3D modeling tool at the time). Concurrently I developed the menu and inventory since gems needed to be accessed somehow, which also included the much-requested settings menu.

Then I switched efforts to time. Gemstones needed to grow based on real-life time, and I also wanted a day cycle to capture houseki's beautiful lighting. I toiled quite a bit with time implementation, and with getting the day cycle to look good. I found that smoothly transitioning between gradients was a good way to change the sky color, and tinkered with the colors a lot before declaring the day cycle done.

Then I returned to the gem material, completely overhauling it to allow for the 20+ gem varieties now in the game, and also reworked sculpting.

Early in 2023 after making the design doc, I realized that Lustrous Spirit was becoming a bigger project than what I could handle alone. I had made a discord server for development and invited some willing friends, but obligations prevented us from doing too much work together until the summer. Goterina and Catisioo, who I had previously worked with on a houseki zine with joined to help with 3D modeling, and Chord Shore, a friend from university, joined to do sound design. Also Calex poked around in a code a bit and helped implement gem stats.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments, email me or message on discord - andrewdunne.gamedev@gmail.com | @oatvercast (discord).

Thanks to rookirk for review and feedback.