Hello everyone! My name is Takashi Ishihara, I’m the game director and art director Lumins are created in Enhance. It’s been just over a month since we launched Lumines Arise, a novel version of the Lumines series of puzzle games originally launched in 2004, on PlayStation 5 with optional PS VR2 support. We hope you enjoyed playing Journey Mode, exploring Mission Mode and its training missions and challenges, battling against other players from around the world in Burst Battle Mode, or taking part in Loomii Live’s weekend events.
I’d like to give you more insight into the development of Lumines Arise and how the Enhance team brought this project to life.
Defining Next Generation Lumins
We knew it then Tetris Effect: Connectedwe wanted to visit Lumines again. The biggest question on our minds at the time was: “What defines the next Lumines?” An image began to form in my head and I spent time thinking about key words and colors that would represent the novel game. At first everything was very abstract, but slowly the main idea took shape. That’s when I sat down with executive producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi to agree on the basic concept and direction we wanted to take this iteration. Once this was agreed upon, I became fully involved in the design of each stage, selecting the moments or feelings I wanted to visualize, including the UI/UX, and getting an idea of the musical styles that could fit each of them.
Once everything was put together, I shot a pre-visualization video. That’s when the real band started to take shape, so I shared it with them. We started talking about how to take the concept and make it better from the ground up. After this initial shaping and refining process, we actually started creating the game.
Stages of development over time
A common question we get is how long it takes to create a full scene from start to finish. Well, that’s a bit of a strenuous question to answer because when we’re developing a game, we’re constantly tweaking, tweaking, and tweaking little things. This happened a bit like our house at Enhance! At no point do we say, “OK, we’ve finished this stage, time to move on to the next one!”
The initial design for a single scene is quite broad – its visuals, music and sound, and the feeling we want it to evoke. Then, as we work, each person on the team, whether a visual designer or a member of the audio team, makes corrections and changes. This continuous process doesn’t end, but if you put it all on a timeline, you might find that each step took three or four months from start to finish! Sometimes we moved our attention to certain stages, leaving others to “breathe” and come back to them later. Every element of the scene—visual effects, sound effects, and music—must work together harmoniously. The design influences the music, the music influences the design, and we change things throughout the process until the very end. When we reach a point where there is harmony and the playing is good, then we know that the stage is working and everything is in the most polished, perfect condition.
Talking a little more about matching music to scene visualization, this is very broad to begin with. From what I just described, you could say that our programming style is very fluid. But at the beginning we do a lot of musical planning, analyzing sound waves, checking MIDI data, timing and BPM. However, it is very similar to making something from a mountain of clay. You have a plan, but as you create it, you remove things, add textures, or maybe you need to add elements back. Perhaps the shape or curve you added no longer works. You’re always improving and improving, and our programming style gives you some room for that flexibility.
On the cutting room floor
Were there any stages that we cut from the game? There were a few that we started working on very early in development that just didn’t fit thematically. One had an ocean theme and the other had a forest theme – ultimately it didn’t feel consistent with the Lumines experience we were building. I set the bar high for what I expected from the novel Lumines game. After working on these types of games for the last 20 years, focusing on the core of synesthesia, I had to dig deeper and found that darker, cooler sounds work better than the brighter and sometimes softer epic-scale vibrations that are more naturally suited to games like Tetris Effect: Connected.
It’s a VR feeling
For the first time, Lumines can also be played in virtual reality. Have you tried it on PS VR2? We wanted to make playing Lumines in VR feel like being in the front row at a concert. Lights, energy, stage in front of you. It took a lot of work to get the perfect camera angle and create those feelings. If you’ve played on PS VR2, you may have noticed lights, particles, and other things appear that aren’t apparent when playing on a TV. These petite details, along with the vibrations of the headset, will support you become even more immersed in the experience.
A huge task
All previous games in the Lumines series were built in 2D. With Lumines Arise, we bring all this to 3D, which means we’re working with a lot of assets, a lot of sound components and music. Each scene’s graphics, music and sound effects are different across all 36 stages. The scope of the job was so ambitious that we extended the production schedule by six months to get everything ready. Hopefully the completed project will be effortless, but the scale and scope of its implementation was enormous. It was an absolutely tremendous effort by our team over three and a half years. During this time, our team has grown, we’ve learned a lot of novel technology we haven’t used before, we’ve fine-tuned every step down to the smallest detail, and we’ve released a game that can be played on TV, PlayStation Portal, and in virtual reality via PS VR2.
I’m very proud that we managed to overcome all the challenges this game presented us with. Lumines Arise is available now on PlayStation 5 with optional PS VR2 compatibility. If you’re a PS Plus Premium subscriber, there’s even a trial version of the game available so you can try the game out for yourself.
