Lumins and Shades (Demo)

Lumins and Shades is a 2D grid-based puzzle game about turning on lights, making memories, and not killing your friends.

In this game you control Lumins, who live in light, and Shades, who live in darkness. They have a common goal of restoring the light that has been lost from the world. To help them, you will guide them around the world to discover puzzles in which they interact with various kinds of switches, each other, and even the light and darkness itself. Solving these puzzles returns some light to the world, revealing more puzzles to tackle.

This demo features:

• 50 puzzles to solve
• Two full areas to explore, and the beginnings of a few more
• Slight random variation in most puzzles to keep them fresh
• Available hard mode in which undos are not allowed
• More than 3000 different looking Lumins and Shades
• Goofy dialog and banter
• Controlled by mouse, keyboard, game controller, or any combination of these you like

As a note on the puzzle design mentality: this is a game which aims to teach the player its mechanics though design alone, rather than telling them to the player directly. This is accomplished by introducing new concepts in the simplest possible puzzle that makes use of that concept, slowly building it into more complex puzzles, and weaving it in with previous ideas. That being said, the rules are actually fairly straightforward with a few twists as you go, so the puzzles end up fully fleshing out these ideas and create some serious challenges. Thus, you can expect to enjoy the puzzle solving and the learning process as well.

Also, despite the puzzles' apparent reliance on color, the game is fully playable by anyone with color perception difficulties, since all switches and lights are labeled with their color. There are various visual options (brightness, greyscale environment) that can further help in distinguishing when something is in the light.

A major purpose for releasing this demo is to acquire feedback so that I can improve the game. As such, I have a feedback form you can fill out:

https://goo.gl/forms/b8VYc9vXL...

If you played the demo, please please please take a bit of time fill out even a small fraction of it (especially if you have any kind of color-blindness, or commonly have weird display or controller problems.)