 The construction of Luminous was similar in concept to Epic Games'Unreal Engine or the Unity engine from Unity Technologies in that it incorporated all the development tools needed from asset editing onward, as well as being "high quality, easy to use, flexible, high speed, compact, and supporting both manual and automatic [game development methods]." The development team drew inspiration for this concept and approach from Unreal Engine and CryTek's CryEngine. The name "Luminous" was chosen to reflect the crystal theme of the Final Fantasy series. There were many major factors that the team considered while building the engine, as they wanted to insure the highest possible quality for high-end games. Some of the environmental factors included lighting, shading and modeling. A core feature of the gameplay was the artificial intelligence (AI), which had previous been liable to become unstable or poor under certain conditions or with poor programming due to the large amount of individual codes needed. For Luminous, the team created a single unifying flexible framework to control the scale of the AI while also making it intuitive. It was intended to be used in-house rather than licensed out to other developers, but that western subsidiaries of the company would have access to it. In addition, they also built in the ability to blend graphical assets designed for CG scenery with highly advanced real-time animation, making the two graphically similar. Luminous Studio was publicly revealed in 2011.
