To the average person without a background in coding, the idea of building a video game—a real one, with professional graphics and everything—seems daunting, if not outright impossible. Thanks to advances in software and visual scripting engines, though, it is possible for novices to create their own surprisingly advanced video games, provided they have a solid understanding of computers and dozens, if not hundreds, of hours to devote to the task. It’s an enormous undertaking, but a doable one.
Milwaukee electronic artist LUXI is proof of that. She’d always been a gamer but didn’t have any development experience when she decided she wanted to build her own game a couple of years ago. She found the experience wasn’t all that different from making DIY electronic music. Both involve endless hours alone, experimenting until the desired effect is achieved and consulting online tutorials, YouTube videos and forums for help when needed.
“The kindness of strangers in forums really helped when doing this,” she says. “I definitely spent a lot of hours doing very tedious technical tasks. It definitely requires a certain personality type to sit at a computer for hours and hours and look at lines of code.”
She conceived her debut game Lost Letters (of Seraphina) as both a video game and an album, with each level lasting the length of a song. “I started making this game and working on the music part of it simultaneously, so it progressed over time,” she said. “I’d work on the game for a little bit, then work on the music for a little bit, just chipping away at it.”
The game follows a young protagonist named Elle as she navigates a post-apocalyptic world, scavenging for electronics while piecing together the mystery of how her town, Seraphina, collapsed. “There isn’t a way of winning or losing,” LUXI says. “I just wanted the player to sit down and experience the album. It’s all about the experience of exploring.”
As part of the process of developing the game, LUXI says she wrote about 70 pages of backstory, including the namesake lost letters that the game’s characters wrote to each other. She compiled some of that material into an accompanying zine. “So technically,” she says, “I made my first self-published book as well.”
That undertaking is made all the more impressive by the performance schedule LUXI maintained while completing the project, which included shows at Summerfest, PrideFest and the Burnhearts/Pabst Street Party. Within the span of just a few years, she went from being a virtually unknown underground oddity to one of the most in-demand headliners in Milwaukee’s electronic music scene, an honor she credits to the approachable nature of her music. Underneath her experimental production approach, she writes heartfelt pop songs about relationships and anxieties, and sings in a naked, vulnerable voice that cuts an empathetic contrast to the alien soundscapes.
“It probably helps that I have live vocals and bring in live aspects, like playing the keyboard,” LUXI speculates on the appeal of her live show. “I think people connect to how personal the songs are. When people think of electronic music, they think of a more sterile electronic dance music that’s made to a certain formula, but that’s not what’s going on in the underground scene. A lot of artists are making really personal music, especially here in Milwaukee.”
LUXI plays an album release show Thursday, Nov. 1, at Cactus Club at 9 p.m. with Dashcam and Immortal Girlfriend. Lost Letters (of Seraphina) will be available that same day at Steampowered.com.
