Research notes
Engineering notes from building CRI inside Luminids.
Four dated accounts of architecture changes, failures, experiments and design ideas, from the game where CRI is being developed.
01 The notes
The decisions, discoveries and ideas behind the work.
Read the summaries below, or open a title for the founder's full account.
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They Left a Space for You (opens luminids.com)
The character architecture was rebuilt around one controller for needs, jobs, movement and personality. This gave a character one place to coordinate its behaviour, so joining an activity would not break its work queue.
The tests passed. Watching a real colony for ninety minutes still found two failures: the unsheltered population froze overnight, and an unmet need left a character stuck while its thinking cost climbed.
The lesson was to combine automated checks with observation of the game. As the post puts it: “Green tests are evidence. They are not a verdict.”
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One Line of Godot Cost Us a Second Per Frame (opens luminids.com)
One recursive search in the character thinking loop cost close to a second per frame in the worst case. Caching the result removed almost all of that cost.
Three other failures looked successful to the checks that should have caught them. A naming mismatch selected the wrong physics backend. Face rendering followed distance from the player’s body instead of the camera. Exported telemetry understated loading time.
Each problem required checking what the game actually did. The essay asks developers to verify the measurements and assumptions behind a passing result.
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The Light Already Lives Here (opens luminids.com)
Designed, not shipped
The first-contact design makes a colony gradually less wary when repeated visits pass without harm. Players would read that change through behaviour rather than a visible score.
The second proposes cultural gifts with no gameplay advantage. A band would teach a song, a dance or a light pattern, which a visitor could learn and perform at home.
The aim is exchange for its own sake: a shared experience that becomes part of a colony’s life, without turning culture into a route to better statistics.
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How Luminids Think (opens luminids.com)
Superseded by the July 2026 post
The earlier design combined a three-axis personality model, tendencies earned through repetition and relationships that accumulated slowly. The July rebuild replaced this architecture.
Its central aim continues: an unexpected action should make sense when the player understands the character’s history. The post is useful context for how that question developed.
02 Notes and claims
Follow the work from an idea to evidence.
Each note captures a moment in development. The claim register connects today's capabilities to their supporting evidence.
Read each post in the context of its date. Some record observed behaviour; others set out a design or describe an architecture that has since changed.
The three labels
- Implemented
- Runs in Luminids, with tests and saved character state.
- In production validation
- Runs in the game and is undergoing broader validation.
- Proposed
- The capabilities and tools we’re working towards.