Luminis Novel

Read · Choose · Branch

Stories don't scale. Until now.

A visual novel you read, choose, and branch through — on your phone, a chapter at a time.

Luminis writes itself — not as improv, but inside a deterministic structure that keeps the names, the cat, and the year the letter came on-model from page one to page four hundred.

Closed alpha iOS Google Play

The thing nobody's solved yet

"AI fiction reads like someone forgot what happened three pages ago."

— the entire genre, since 2023

Most AI fiction

"Marya stroked the cat's ginger fur and thought of her sister."

chapter 1, page 3

"Mara crouched by the black cat. She had never had a sibling."

chapter 3, page 7
NAME · CAT · BACKSTORY

Luminis

"Marya stroked the cat's ginger fur and thought of her sister."

chapter 1, page 3

"Marya knelt by the ginger cat — the one her sister had named, a year before the letter came."

chapter 3, page 7
STATE · HELD

Most AI stories drift. Names change. The cat turns from ginger to black. The sister appears and disappears. By chapter three, the model has forgotten you. Luminis doesn't — because the model isn't in charge of remembering. A machine is.

What you'll actually read

A novel you finish on the bus, a chapter at a time.

Open the app. Read where you left off. Make a choice that costs you something. Close it on a cliffhanger that makes tomorrow's commute feel shorter. That's the whole loop. We just want it to feel like a real book.

9:41● ● ●
‹ LIBRARY
60 SEASON 1 · NEW

The Salt Chapel

SLOW-BURN ROMANCE · ELENA & KAI

EPISODES

01

The Letter

18 min · read

02

The Salt Chapel

20 min · cliffhanger

RESUME ›
03

The Bargain

unlocks in 23:14

STORIESREADINGYOU

01

Pick up where you left off

The season list remembers your place. Tonight's episode at the top, last night's checked off.

9:41● ● ●
EP 02 · 14 / 22aA ☰
KAI
+2

KAI

He did not look up when she came in. The candle had burned low; the salt on the table had not been swept.

WHAT DO YOU DO?

Sit beside him. KAI +1
Speak first. FREE
Touch his hand. 10 ◆

02

Read it like a book

A sprite, a dialogue box, prose that lingers. Two free choices, one premium one — never more, never gacha.

9:41● ● ●

END OF EPISODE 02

To be
continued.

Kai turned, and for a moment she thought he might —

YOUR STORY · 02

Bond · Kai +5 ▮▮▮▯▯
Bond · Lys ——
Flags letter_kept, salt_oath

Wait — Ep 3 unlocks in 23:14

03

Leave on a cliffhanger

Every episode ends on a held breath. Wait until tomorrow, or unlock now. Your call.

How a machine writes a novel without losing the plot

We didn't replace the writer.

We replaced the room around them.

A chatbot writes one paragraph at a time and forgets the previous one. Luminis works the other way around. The plot is a deterministic program. The state is a database. The model only writes the prose inside a structure it can't break.

01.

The skeleton

Every episode starts as a deterministic skeleton — beats, choices, flags, stat changes. The model writes inside the structure. It can't produce a malformed chapter.

02.

The memory

Characters' voices, histories, and feelings live in a state machine, not in the model's context window. Marya's sister exists in chapter 1 and in chapter 12 because she's a row in a table, not a sentence in a prompt.

03.

The sprites

One base portrait per character. Every pose, every expression, every outfit is derived from it through an edit chain that holds identity. The cat stays ginger.

04.

The choices

Premium moments — diamond branches, outfit beats, cliffhanger gates — are first-class objects in the skeleton, not last-mile flavor text. Monetization is structural, not bolted on.

Net effect: a full episode costs roughly what a model API call costs. No writers' room. No copy-edit pass. No drift.

ELENA · v0.4 · seed locked

One character · twenty-one expressions · same person

E

neutral

ELENA · neutral

E

smile

ELENA · smile

E

shock

ELENA · shock

E

tears

ELENA · tears

E

blush

ELENA · blush

E

anger

ELENA · anger

CSS placeholders · final sprite art in LCOR-122

What's coming

The plan, in the open.

Luminis is in closed alpha. We're opening the doors in stages so the people who read it first help shape the rest. Here's what's on the calendar — same plan we're telling our investors, same plan we're telling you.

NOW · MAY 2026

Closed alpha

A small group of readers is in the first episode. We're tuning pacing, choice weight, and how the relationship meter feels under real fingers.

  • —Episode 1 live · Episode 2 in copy edit
  • —Sprite pipeline v0.4 · Elena fully on-model
  • —Daily playtest cohort · 40 readers

SUMMER 2026

Public demo — first arc playable

A full playable arc opens to the public, free, on iOS and Android. You can read the whole arc start to finish, make choices that matter, hit the ending that fits the choices you made.

  • —iOS & Android stores
  • —Save-resume, replay-for-alternates
  • —Premium-choice surface live

FALL 2026

Open beta — second story arc

A second arc with a new cast, written entirely through the pipeline. Proves the system scales beyond one set of characters. New genres start showing up.

  • —Second cast · second world
  • —Cross-arc state experiments
  • —Reader-driven choice telemetry public

2027 →

A real catalog

Many arcs, many genres, weekly chapter drops. Not a hundred-title catalog of slop — a small, deliberate shelf, all held to the same bar as the first arc.

  • —Weekly chapter cadence
  • —Reader book clubs & commentary tracks
  • —A studio that doesn't grow when the catalog does

Two ways in

You're here to read it, or you're here to back it. Either way.

Readers

Get the first episode in your inbox.

We'll send Episode 1 the moment we open the gate. No spam, no waitlist theater, no daily emails — just one note when there's something real to read.

Investors

Read the dossier. Book the walkthrough.

Series A is open. The dossier covers the pipeline, the unit economics, the comp set, and the alpha numbers we have so far. Thirty minutes is enough to know whether it's for you.

Send the dossier →
or book a 30-min walkthrough ·
NEXT: MAY 21 · 2 PM PT RESERVE ›

The studio

Three people, no writers' room.

A writer, a researcher, an editor. Between us, twelve years writing for games, a PhD in computational linguistics, and a bestseller's worth of editorial scars. The pipeline is the fourth person in the room.

M

M. Aldwin

Founder & writer

Wrote for narrative games for twelve years. Two #1 interactive fiction titles. Writes the chapter intent files by hand, still.

R

R. Solas

Co-founder & engineer

Comp-linguistics PhD. Designed the skeleton generator. Spends most evenings teaching it to be more wrong, less catastrophically.

J

J. Hara

Co-founder & editor

Editorial veteran. NYT-list editor. Reads every alpha chapter and tells the model exactly where it lost the thread.