Building the World of Luminous Card Game

Humble beginnings

The origins of Luminous were first born in rural Tennessee, in an 8th grade algebra math class in the Spring of 2005.

I was 13 years old, and I should have been paying attention to the teacher talking about graphing linear equations, but my mind was starting to create the world that Luminous Card Game would be built on.

That Spring I wrote Darklight, the first science fiction/fantasy story I had ever attempted. It was a 34-page short story about a sword that had shattered into 7 pieces and been lost around The Continent. It was super cheesy. A 13-year-old boy from Earth gets accidentally teleported to The Continent by a mage and is tasked to find all the pieces and help reforge Darklight. 

The really cool part of the story and thing I am most proud of is that if the sword is being wielded, the wielder can see everything that cannot be seen. This is still a part of the lore today. But don't worry, there is not a 13-year-old Earthling saving this distant world.

My Mom still has the 2-inch white ring binder, with 3-hole punched paper, that I wrote Darklight in and is very proud to say she saved it.

Getting older

I didn't write another story or work on the world of Darklight/Luminous for 6 years. I was a sophomore at Texas State in San Marcos, TX. I was finally ready to start writing and thought I was an "adult" and smart and wise enough to finish Darklight. But I got distracted and wrote dozens of weird short stories; most were dark fantasy or dystopian.

That year I got a job at a new local game store and got into this small game called Magic the Gathering. I stopped writing and started playing card and board games for the next 5 years.

I moved to NYC for a few years in my mid 20's and was brought on with Hipsters of the Coast to write 10 articles for them about MTG Finance and a breakdown about how I took a collection worth only a few hundred dollars and traded it up to a Black Lotus. (We can do another newsletter if you want to hear more about this). 

Writing for them reignited my desire to write and brought me back to the decade old stories and world I wanted to build in my head: Darklight/Luminous.

Building a world

I then spent years in my late 20's literally building the world. Dozens of drawings, building out The Continent, species, locations, the names of the largest 3 cities: Auda, Scar, and Velo.

On top of world building, I was starting to write out stories of small characters from different places in time on The Continent. Each one contained a dark twist. The cause? The pieces of Darklight. The shattered sword long lost and forgotten, its pieces now in the hands of different characters through time. Prolonged health and life, but only about 100 extra years, not forever.

I want to rewrite one of them and share it. For the most part, the world was great and starting to come alive, but the stories were novice and cliche.

By the end of my 20's, I knew that I was a great world builder but not a great writer. What I needed was to share this world with someone who could see my vision and make it far better than I ever could. 

By the Spring of 2022, the world was built. A full world, with magical bees whose honey gave you extra knowledge and insight. All the species, dozens of factions at war with each other over these ancient Relics called Orbs that had magically turned on after being dormant for thousands of years. 

With the Orbs turned on, other Relics were coming to life, and this lost technology was being rediscovered. The world was half medieval dark fantasy, and half science fiction. Imagine if in the 1500's we had travelled to Egypt and the tech that built the pyramids was there and we were learning how to turn it on.

Building a game from the world

Around the same time, in March of 2022, I showcased a very early version of "Orbs," which would be changed in 2023 to "Arduous," and then in 2024 to "Luminous."

I will write a whole other newsletter about game design, building your first game and throwing spaghetti at a wall for years until something sticks. on a different set of rails I was trying to make card and board games for about a decade but always saw these as two different projects/ideas until the Spring of 2022. 

As the game and world were coming together in 2023, I met with Cory Outlaw at a pizza place in south Austin. We talked for over two hours and he agreed to join the team, write the stories, and bring my ideas to life. Cory has gone on to become a co-owner and founder in Luminous Games. He writes all of our flavor text, card names,  and, most importantly, helps in lore design and world building.

It has been a really long road. At times I spent years working really hard. At times I was lost or depressed and gave up on ever seeing this world come to life. In the end, though, I never gave up and finally found the courage to write it down, to tell others and to find the badass team that can bring it to life. 

Welcome to the world of Luminous.

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