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Luma – Celestial Path

By Jonas on June 6th, 2004

Luma – Celestial Path was a collaboration between Jonas Svegland (me), Erik Odeldahl, Hannes Norda (Mediatechnologies, Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlshamn, Sweden) and Mats Johansson (GDI, Konstfack (University College of Arts, Craft and Design) in Stockholm, Sweden). My main role in this project was as a programmer. I mainly focused on creating visual effects, with DirectX 8 and HLSL, as particle systems, explosions and such.

The goal of the project was to produce a playable prototype of a video game, primarily for the PC-market. Luma was a contribution to revive the languishing shoot-em-up-game genre. We wanted to preserve the past, but at the same time introduce brand new concepts. luma_logoWe used modern graphic boards to create the most visually enjoyable experience possible. The result was a hard game, requiring technique and mind that made a stand for jazz music in videogames.

Screenshots

 

 Videos

Download

By clicking here you can download the LUMA prototype v3.0 (73 MB, requires DirectX 8.0)

Remember, this is just a prototype version of the game. All rights are reserved and all media in the game are copyright to the LUMA crew.

The game

The goal of the game, besides making it alive to the boss at the end, is to free the light captured inside the dark enemies and collect the light particles released. All this while you protect your light source at the bottom of the screen from enemies.

The special weapons must be channeled thru enemy light explosions to be activated. The explosion works kind of like a prism for the special weapons, especially the blue one that is based on the angle that you hit the light explosions.

You can either play it with a gamepad or you can use the keyboard.

  • W, A, S, D to control the movement of the ship
  • DOWN to fire
  • LEFT to use the red special weapon
  • UP to use the green special weapon
  • RIGHT to use the blue special weapon

If you run the game using a widescreen resolution, i.e. 16:9 or 16:10, the sidebars doesn’t display correctly. Set your display resolution to a 4:3 ratio, i.e. 1024*764 or 800*600

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