Persistent cognition infrastructure for game characters
Build characters that remember, change and remain coherent across long-running worlds.
LuminidsAI is building CRI Platform: a reusable runtime and developer toolchain for persistent character identity, memory, beliefs, relationships and expectations.
Built first inside Luminids, our own game, CRI is being productised for game teams where character continuity is already a production problem.
Read the story and its source
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Dawn Meet Astra and Ember. A game of chase is about to change how Astra sees herself.
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Morning Astra is the peach luminid. Ember is blue. Watch what happens when they play chase.
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Midday Astra escapes the chaser and remembers it. One escape is not enough to make her think she is the fast one.
Astra: Astra outruns the chaser for a whole leg
- Saw
- Astra lives the moment: Astra outruns the chaser for a whole leg.
- Remembered
- The leg is stored as first-hand evidence for the idea that Astra is the fast one.
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Midday She gets away again. Astra now remembers two escapes.
Astra: Astra outruns the chaser again
- Saw
- Astra lives the moment: Astra outruns the chaser again.
- Remembered
- The leg is stored as first-hand evidence for the idea that Astra is the fast one.
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Midday Ember gets away. He remembers his first escape.
Ember: Ember outruns the chaser for a whole leg
- Saw
- Ember lives the moment: Ember outruns the chaser for a whole leg.
- Remembered
- The leg is stored as first-hand evidence for the idea that Ember is the fast one.
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Midday Ember escapes too. He has managed it twice, but has not started thinking of himself as the fast one.
Ember: Ember outruns the chaser again
- Saw
- Ember lives the moment: Ember outruns the chaser again.
- Remembered
- The leg is stored as first-hand evidence for the idea that Ember is the fast one.
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Afternoon Astra escapes for the third time. Now she believes: “I’m the fast one.”
Astra: Astra outruns the chaser a third time; Ember is elsewhere
- Saw
- Astra lives the moment: Astra outruns the chaser a third time; Ember is elsewhere.
- Remembered
- The leg is stored as first-hand evidence for the idea that Astra is the fast one.
- Believed
- Astra now holds the belief: three legs of evidence, and the idea forms.
- Reacted
- Astra pauses and takes the idea in.
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Evening Astra gets caught. One loss makes her doubt herself, but she still believes she is fast.
Astra: Astra is caught
- Saw
- Astra lives the moment: Astra is caught.
- Remembered
- The leg is stored as first-hand evidence against the idea that Astra is the fast one.
- Believed
- Doubt rises to 1 of the 2 that would shake it; the belief still holds.
- Reacted
- Astra does not react yet: the belief absorbs the first contradiction and still holds.
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Evening Astra gets caught again. This time she lets go of the idea that she is the fast one.
Astra: Astra is caught again
- Saw
- Astra lives the moment: Astra is caught again.
- Remembered
- The leg is stored as first-hand evidence against the idea that Astra is the fast one.
- Believed
- The belief is dropped: two contradictions in a row and Astra no longer holds it.
- Reacted
- Astra shows the question and a quiet pause, and the day goes into their life story as "The day the fast one got caught".
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Night The colony gathers by the fire. For Astra, this became “The day the fast one got caught”.
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Night What if Astra had not held that belief? Choose “Without it” to compare the same catch.
The belief values and responses come from two game recordings. The landscape, movement and day cycle stage that story. The second recording clears Astra’s belief before the catches. Read every step of both.
01 The problem
Characters can talk. Keeping them coherent over time is still bespoke.
Studios building persistent characters still have to connect memory, relationships, save state, game events, model boundaries, authoring, debugging and behavioural testing.
That infrastructure is expensive to build, difficult to keep coherent and hard to debug.
The player expectation is much simpler: “My relationship with this character actually changed them.”
Quill knows he is safe. Astra doesn’t. CRI preserves that difference.
CRI Platform is being built to make that infrastructure reusable: a runtime plus tools to author, inspect, replay and test character state.
The next step is to validate whether other studios will adopt and pay for it, starting with teams making life and colony sims, systemic RPGs, social sandboxes and companion-led games.
02 The architecture
The game knows what happened. CRI keeps what this character knows.
Contextual Relational Intelligence (CRI) turns the events that reach each character into persistent identity, memory, beliefs, relationships and expectations. Models can reason or speak from that state without having to store the character themselves.
| Character architecture | Prompt and context layer | CRI character state |
|---|---|---|
| Continuity | History can be assembled for a model interaction | History stays with the character across interactions and saves |
| Knowledge | Retrieved context informs the current model turn | Character-specific evidence defines what this individual can know |
| Model role | Interpret the character context it receives | Express state held outside the model |
03 The proof
Remove one belief. Replay the same event. The response disappears.
Astra formed a belief through experience. We restored the same character with that belief removed and replayed the scheduled catch.
Her previous escape memories remain. Clear the belief before the shared event and the response changes.
That is the kind of causal link CRI is designed to make visible: experience changes the character, and developers can inspect the path.
The second catch, with and without her belief.
04 The product
Give characters a history. See why they changed. Test what caused it.
CRI Engine carries persistent character state. CRI Studio, Bench and Trace form the developer workflow around it: author, inspect, intervene, replay and test.
Core CRI mechanisms run inside Luminids today. The reusable platform is the productisation step that takes those mechanisms beyond our own game.
What CRI Platform is made of
- CRI Engine Runtime for persistent character state.
- CRI Studio Author and inspect character state.
- CRI Bench Intervene on state, replay situations and test what changes.
05 Built in Luminids
Luminids is customer zero, not product-market fit.
It gives CRI a real production environment. The next proof is external adoption.
Luminids tests CRI against real saves, player behaviour, partial information, changing relationships and a real game’s performance budget.
It does not yet prove portable integration, willingness to pay or repeatable sales. That is the next stage of the company.
Artificial characters should have a point of view.
- 1,000+ playtesters have played the game in testing
- 335k Steam store visits while the game is listed as coming soon
Building a life simulation, colony simulation, systemic RPG, social sandbox or companion-led game? Talk to us about CRI.