WRITING SAMPLES

Lumen

A submission to Pirate Software - Game Jam 15

Theme: Shadows and Alchemy

Lumen is a platformer game about collecting fireflies of different colors to combine and bring back to light and life the secondary characters of forgotten tales, and keeping your inner light lit.

Writing for Lumen

Player and Plum in the color fireflies jars room

The GGD

I aimed for clarity while drawing on industry-relevant terminology. Each section is structured to pitch and describe the game in all its parts, while always making it a point to use words and expressions that resonate with the theme.

You can view and read the complete file here.

Below is an overview with some screenshots from the file.

The index, the skeleton of the file

Pitch and inspiration, with source of inspiration highlighted in yellow, and relevant mechanics and narrative ideas in bold.

The explanation of the gameplay and how it interweaves with the jam theme. Core concepts in bold and yellow.

Clear and concise explanation of mechanics with their in-game names and animated visuals.

UI and Dialogues

According to the game design, players won't spend much time in menus unless they want to adjust volumes or check controls. Usually, buttons don't accommodate many characters, so conciseness was paramount: no truncated words, small fonts, or inconsistencies among font dimensions, to fit the available space.

Dialogues are written to convey the mood of the jam theme and give personality to the two speaking characters. Since the game lore is about fairy tales, I used common phrasing like "Once upon a time" or "happily ever after", and words like "knight", "hero", "adventure" and so on.

Below is an overview with some in-game screenshots.

The main menu, which also serves as title screen.

The pause menu with basic buttons and features.

"Once upon a time" to introduce the game lore.

The ultimate goal of the game; "linger", "mist" and "save" as reference to jam theme.

"leap of faith" suggests the idea of the dash movement.

Use of color tags to highlight the input required to dash. HEX codes are the same as the main game palette.

Plum, the light purple NPC, is our guide and has a playful tone (he rubs his eyes and laughs).

The expression "see through this" conveys at the same time the meaning of seeing and unseeing the platforms and trying to understand why they keep disappearing. I believe it serves well as an introduction to Neon Vision power-up.

"black and white" and "shade" recall the shadow part of the theme, and they are used in a motto-like exclamation to introduce the Gravity toggle power-up.

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