The gestation time allowed me to improve the design of the city, to employ people like the architect Catrina Stewart. I’m pleased we waited to begin the sequel. The game went on to get nominated for an IGF award in 2012, win a Develop Showcase award, and its success gave us the confidence to set about the grand vision of Lumino City. It helped us prove the technology, develop the backstory to the game world, and also allowed us to see if the idea was something people liked. Would it be possible to track our characters movements to all the big camera moves? How would we afford to build it? Would anyone even buy it? So we decided to start small and took one scene from the big story - Grandad’s house - and turned that into the neat self-contained adventure Lume. We had plans to build a huge city back then, and we did a few tests with cardboard boxes, but we realised quickly that it was too ambitious and risky for us to pull off with so many questions as yet unanswered. We’d been wanting to make a puzzle adventure game for a long time, and in 2011 we did just that, working in our spare time to create Lume, which is also built entirely by hand and is the prequel to Lumino City. It was refreshing to have another less epic project to think about, and after it was featured by Apple in the iOS Store it became pretty successful, helping fund the second half of Lumino City development and meaning we could stay completely independent. So Dan and I decided we would take a day off a week and work on a puzzle game called KAMI. We were running out of funds and I also wanted us to keep excited about things we were making. That was longer than planned somehow we thought it might just take a year and a half. It was about three years from start to finish. How long have you been working on the game? The "eureka" moments were all more more satisfying for it. And some of the greatest fun we had was when we were looking at a scene, knowing what we wanted to achieve, but not exactly how we’d go about it. For example Dan developed some great tricks to help us fit the characters into the scene and make sure they were blurred correctly and had the right amount of film-grain, while still remaining interactive. Knowing the tool inside out helped us dive right into it and start making things happen, and we could then keep pushing it as far as it would go. It meant I could use all the animation skills I’ve developed, and also employ other Flash animators to help out. It’s the only tool which allows easy syncing between video and animation. All our games have used some element of the hand-made - I was screen printing my graphics back at university for example - and this has culminated in Lumino City, where we built an entire model city to film for the game environment. We now work with Dan, who’s the main developer, and Steffan, an artist. I’m an artist at heart, and I wanted to make larger games, so I teamed up with Katherine to create State of Play.Īt around the same time the iPhone came about, Steam was getting really popular, and it seemed like there were opportunities to create great independent creative projects. By 2008 doing both the art and the code was too much. I went freelance soon afterwards in 2004 and became a kind of indie developer - making games for online portals like Miniclip and the BBC in between making animations. I was making Flash games at university, then my first job involved designing them. As part of our Road to the IGF series, we talked to Luke Whittaker of State of Play about Lumino City, as well as the prominent use of depth of field to really sell the intricacy of the sets that they built, and the unique difficulties of having to film your game instead of render it. It's no surprise, then, that Lumino City has been nominated for Excellence in Visual Art at this year's IGF Main Competition.
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