Most gamers know what I mean when I use the term “souls-like,” but what about “hearts-like?”
Kingdom Hearts has a unique style, a unique heads-up display (HUD), unique enemies, and multiple unique combat systems. Roll all of those into one, and you have a Kingdom Hearts-like game. At least, that’s what Yahya Danboos believes.
He is the developer of Luminous Nights, and I got a chance to ask him about his experience creating this game, how he was heavily inspired by Kingdom Hearts, and what gamers can expect from a brand-new story with a familiar look and feel.
You describe Luminous Nights as a “Hearts-like” game, in reference to the well-loved Kingdom Hearts franchise. What does the term “Hearts-like” mean to you, and why do you think it deserves its own classification as a genre?
For me, a Hearts-like is essentially a game that combines the 3D platforming and exploration mechanics of games like Super Mario 64 with the role-playing game (RPG) mechanics, character progression, and story-driven structure of games like Final Fantasy.
Kingdom Hearts was one of the games that really brought those two styles together. You have the freedom of movement, jumping, platforming, and exploration that you would expect from a 3D platformer, but at the same time, you have RPG systems like leveling, equipment, abilities, magic, party members, and a large story-driven adventure.
That combination is what defines a Hearts-like for me.
With Luminous Nights, I’m taking a lot of inspiration from the exploration and 3D platforming of Kingdom Hearts I together with the faster action combat of Kingdom Hearts II, while building my own world, story, characters, and systems around that foundation.
I think Hearts-like deserves to be recognized as its own classification because there still isn’t really an established genre name for this specific combination of 3D platforming and story-driven action RPG mechanics. Calling something an action RPG alone doesn’t really communicate the importance of movement, platforming, and exploration to the experience.
I’ve actually thought quite a lot about what defines this kind of game, to the point that I made an entire video discussing the idea of the Hearts-like genre and what separates it from other action RPGs.
How do you balance taking inspiration from a title like Kingdom Hearts without making a “KH clone”? How does a title like Luminous Nights set itself apart?
First and foremost, Luminous Nights is a Kingdom Hearts-inspired game, and I’m not shying away from that. That was the starting point for the entire project.
I’ve always loved Kingdom Hearts, and I’ve always wanted to make a game that gave me that same kind of feeling. When I started developing Luminous Nights about four and a half years ago, Kingdom Hearts was the main inspiration, and it still is to this day.
Of course, Luminous Nights has its own story, world, characters, and identity. The story is completely original, and I’m also aiming for a somewhat darker tone. So from that perspective, the game definitely has its own direction.
But there is one important philosophy I have while developing it. A lot of people tell me that I should try completely new systems, add major twists to the Kingdom Hearts formula, or find ways to innovate on it. That is absolutely something I’m interested in doing, but there’s a reason I haven’t focused heavily on that yet.
Before I try to innovate on this style of game, I first want to prove that I can actually get the fundamentals right.
I see this happen quite often with games inspired by other titles. A developer starts with an existing formula, but before they have really managed to capture what made that original formula work, they start changing things, adding new systems, and trying to reinvent it. Sometimes the result ends up failing to get even just the base formula right.
With Luminous Nights, I want to first make sure I can successfully capture the feeling, gameplay, movement, combat, exploration, and overall experience that I love about Kingdom Hearts.
Once I know I can pull that off, then I’ll feel much more comfortable experimenting and pushing the formula further in future games.
There are still a few smaller ideas and quality-of-life improvements I want to introduce in Luminous Nights, but I’m deliberately not trying to completely reinvent the formula with this game.
The similarities are intentional. My goal with Luminous Nights is to first understand and execute this kind of game properly before I start trying to redefine it.
Part of what makes series like Kingdom Hearts such a long-term success is its expansive lore and plethora of sequels. Do you currently have future plans to build Luminous Nights into a franchise or series of sequels?
I love Kingdom Hearts and the way its story has continued and expanded across so many games, but with my own games, I want to take a different approach.
For me, Luminous Nights is one game and one complete story. I want someone to be able to pick it up, play it from beginning to end, and experience the entire story without needing to play another game, watch explanation videos, or do any additional homework to understand what happened.
That doesn’t mean Luminous Nights will necessarily be the only “Luminous” game I make. I would love to create more games in the future, but rather than making direct sequels or prequels, my plan is for each new game to tell a completely new and original story with its own characters, setting, and adventure.
There may still be some shared mythology between them. Certain concepts, creatures, or monsters could appear across different games. For example, evil djinn like the Afreets could potentially return in different forms.
I think of it somewhat similarly to Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, where each main entry can tell its own self-contained story while still sharing recognizable ideas, creatures, themes, or traditions between games.
That’s the direction I would like to take with the Luminous games. Each new title would be its own adventure rather than continuing the story of Luminous Nights.
Most importantly, I want every game I make to stand on its own. Someone should be able to discover any one of them, start playing, and get a complete story from that single game.
What’s been the most difficult part about designing a game from scratch? What was something that was easier than expected?
Honestly, pretty much everything has been difficult.
Making every individual mechanic is one thing, but the much harder part is getting all of those mechanics to feel just right, especially when I’m trying to capture a feeling similar to Kingdom Hearts.
If you looked at my Steam account, you would probably see way too many hours of Kingdom Hearts at this point. I constantly go back and play it again, paying attention to very specific things: how the character moves, how jumping feels, how attacks flow into each other, how responsive everything is, and all the little details that contribute to the overall feel of the game. Then I go back to Luminous Nights, make adjustments, test it again, and repeat that process over and over.
That has really been a constant throughout development.
Making a game from scratch is just incredibly difficult. Thankfully, I’m using Unreal Engine, which takes a huge amount of that weight off my shoulders. There are a lot of powerful systems and features in Unreal that have made it possible for me to build things that would otherwise take much longer. But even with those tools, making an entire game is still a massive undertaking.
That’s also a big reason why I’ve been working on Luminous Nights for over four and a half years, and it still isn’t finished. Getting something to simply work is one thing. Getting it to actually feel good and reach the quality I want is something completely different.
As for something that was easier than I expected, I would probably say the inventory and item systems.
Going into them, I expected those systems to be much more complicated than they ended up being. They were still challenging, of course, but by that point I had accumulated years of experience building different gameplay systems, so I was able to approach them much more easily than I probably could have earlier in my career.
It was actually a nice moment where I realized that some things that would have felt extremely complicated to me years ago had become much more manageable because of everything I had learned along the way.
If you could travel back in time to the first day of this project, what advice would you give yourself?
If I could go back to the first day of the project and give myself one piece of advice, it would be to keep the scope as small as possible and not immediately try to take on something this massive.
At this point, I’m already very deep into it, and in a lot of ways, I’m basically trying to build my own Kingdom Hearts-style game from scratch. Looking back, it probably would have been smarter to work my way up to that more gradually.
For example, I could have started by making a much smaller game focused purely on 3D platforming. Then, maybe the next game could introduce more action mechanics, and another game after that could add deeper RPG systems. That way, I could have slowly built up the experience and technology needed to eventually make a full Hearts-like game.
Instead, I basically started by aiming straight for the full package from day one.
There are definitely moments where I look back and think that maybe I made things much harder for myself than they needed to be, and in some ways, I do have some regrets about taking on such a large project so early.
At the same time, there is also something nice about the fact that I committed to it. Because I did take the bigger route, I’ve spent the last several years building all of these systems together, and learning how every part of a game like this connects.
So if I could go back, I would still tell myself to start smaller and build my way up gradually. But since I didn’t, I’m committed to seeing Luminous Nights through and making the best game I can.
Ultimately, what are your goals for Luminous Nights?
Ultimately, my goal with Luminous Nights is to make a Hearts-like game and hopefully give people more games in that genre.
At the same time, I also want to tell my own story. I want Luminous Nights to have an interesting and fun story that feels like a breath of fresh air, with themes, ideas, characters, and a setting that people might not be used to seeing in this kind of game.
On a personal level, it is also very important to me because this is my first fully independent game. After working in the game industry for many years, I finally have the chance to make the game I have always wanted to make. In that sense, Luminous Nights really is my dream game.
But I also see it as the beginning of something bigger.
I want Luminous Nights to be the first game in a larger series of Hearts-like games that I create. The future games would not continue the same story. Each one would have a new story, new characters, and its own world, but they would all share that same core philosophy of action RPG combat, 3D platforming, exploration, and strong storytelling.
With every new game, I would then like to evolve that formula further. Luminous Nights is where I am establishing that foundation and proving that I can make this kind of game properly. From there, I want each future game to build on what I learned, improve the systems, experiment more, and gradually push the Hearts-like genre forward.
So for me, Luminous Nights isn’t just one game I want to finish. I see it as the starting point for the kind of games I want to keep making for a very long time.
How would you describe the balance between storytelling and gameplay? How did you, as a developer, find the balance between engaging gameplay and an engaging story?
First and foremost, I believe a game should be driven by its gameplay.
For me, that has to come first. The player should enjoy moving around, fighting enemies, exploring, platforming, and interacting with the game even before the story is taken into account. So Luminous Nights is very gameplay-heavy, and I see the story as something that is built on top of that foundation.
At the same time, I still want everything the player does to have a reason and a meaning behind it.
Why is Faris in this place? Why is he heading toward a certain destination? Why are these characters around him? What are they doing here? Why does this area exist? Why is the player fighting this enemy or pursuing this objective?
I don’t want things to simply happen because the game needs another level or another boss fight. I want the story to provide context for the gameplay and make the player understand why they are doing what they are doing.
That is where storytelling comes in for me. I use it to give meaning to the player’s journey, flesh out the characters, explain the world around them, and make the different locations and events feel connected.
So the gameplay is the driving force, but the story is what gives that gameplay purpose and helps turn it into a complete adventure.
If you could have an infinite budget, what is one thing you would add to this game that the initial launch version might currently be missing?
Definitely voice acting and high-quality cinematic cutscenes.
Those are two things I made the conscious decision not to include in Luminous Nights because they are extremely difficult to get right, and doing them properly would massively increase the budget of the game.
If I had an infinite budget, I would love to hire a full professional voice cast, a voice director, and everyone else needed to make sure the performances were as good as possible. I would also love to have a dedicated team for the cutscenes—cinematic directors, storyboard artists, animators, lighting artists, and everyone else involved in creating really polished cinematics.
I would love to eventually reach the kind of cinematic quality you see in games like Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy.
That said, I actually don’t feel bad about Luminous Nights not having those things. Because the storytelling is text-based, it gives me a different kind of freedom in how I present scenes.
There are certain moments you can create with this style that wouldn’t necessarily work the same way with a fully cinematic cutscene that simply plays out like a movie. You can control exactly when information is revealed to the player, where the camera moves, what the characters can or can’t see, and how the player experiences a particular moment.
You can see really creative uses of that kind of storytelling in games like To the Moon and Undertale. Something as simple as having a character looking toward something outside the frame and then slowly moving the camera over to reveal what they’re seeing can create a really effective moment.
So I’ve learned to appreciate the style I currently have and take advantage of what it allows me to do.
But if money were genuinely no object, then absolutely, I would love to have full voice acting and incredibly polished cinematic cutscenes on top of everything else.
Are there any easter eggs or secrets players should look for?
Yes, definitely. I plan to have a lot of Easter eggs and secrets throughout Luminous Nights.
In fact, I already hid one in the latest trailer I released, and as far as I know, nobody has really caught on to it yet.
I want the game world to feel rich with things to discover, and also to have a sense of mystery and magic to it. I want players to feel like it is worth checking every nook and cranny because there might always be something hidden there.
That could be an Easter egg, a secret area, an item, a hidden chest, or something else entirely.
For me, exploration is much more interesting when the player feels rewarded for being curious, so I want to fill the world with enough little secrets and surprises that players have a real reason to go off the main path and see what they can find.
At the time of this interview, there is a playtest version of the game. Where can our readers get access to it, and how will their gameplay help the final product?
Anyone can go to the Luminous Nights Steam page and press “Request Access” under the Luminous Nights Playtest section.
Player feedback has been incredibly valuable throughout development.
Because I’m so familiar with the game, there are things I can easily miss that a new player notices immediately. Players have helped me identify bugs, balancing problems, control issues, confusing mechanics, difficulty spikes, and even small quality-of-life improvements.
I read the feedback people send me and use it to decide what needs attention in future updates.
So when someone joins the playtest, they’re not just getting an early look at Luminous Nights. They’re genuinely helping me shape the final game.
And this is also why I make sure to thank everyone and include them in the credits for the game!
A big thank you to Yahya Danboos for his time and for sharing his experience with us. Go download the playtest now on Steam and give him feedback on what you want to see in the game. It’s set to release in 2027.
In the meantime, you can follow along and support his journey on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Kickstarter.
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