State of Play

Has it really been a year since we first launched Lume on Steam? Either my calendar has been tampered with or yes, Lume is indeed deserving of a proper one-year-old’s birthday. So lots of toys it can’t play with yet and cake only the parents can eat.

In fact, we kind of do have a present, for you or someone you know. For a limited time Lume is up to 75% off in the App Store, that’s just $0.99 or £0.69, for iPhone, iPad and in the Mac App Store. If we could put a miniature candle on each for you… actually we wouldn’t. Lume’s made of paper and it would go up like a bonfire.

Click here to go to the App Store if you’d like to make the purchase: http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/lume/id502421311?mt=8

Not our papercraft this one, but it looks tasty.

We’re where we are now thanks to the great support of all you people. Since launch it’s taken us to the Tokyo Games Show and to the IGF awards in San Francisco, and meant that we’ve had the pleasure of being able to focus all our energies on the next part.

Speaking of which, we’ve got a Flash prototype of the first four scenes complete, and we’re refining the gameplay and puzzles right now.  Alongside that, Catrina has built possibly our first final model building for it – it started as a rough and then we kept adding to it until we now think it might be good enough to keep.  Again, more soon!

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Lume is being showcased as part of the Australian Centre for the Moving Image:  Best of the Independent Games Festival 2012 in Melbourne.

More information below:

“ACMI presents 14 brand-new international award winners that expand our expectations of what a video game can be, from the fast-paced 2D platformer Dustforce, to the puzzle filled Lume, and the latest trends in touch screen gaming.”

2012 games include
Botanicula, Amanita Designs
Dear Esther, Thechineseroom
Dustforce, Hitbox Team
Fez, Polytron 
Frozen Synapse, Mode 7
Proun, Joost van Dongen
Spelunky, Mossmouth
To The Moon, Freebird Games
Lume, State of Play
Proteus, Ed Key

Featured mobile games 
ASYNC Corp, Powerhead Games
Beat Sneak Bandit, Simogo Games
Fingle, Game Oven Studio
Temple Run, Imangi Studio 

It’s running from Tuesday 27 March – Sunday 8 July 2012
Open daily 10am – 6pm > Gallery 2
Free admission

Kath

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Hi all,

A few people have mentioned that they get Lume crashing one in a while on some devices, so I thought I’d post something to let you know one thing which should fix the issue.

It appears that this is an issue with the amount of memory some of the devices have.  So simply restart your device (this clears the RAM), make sure no other apps are open, and then play Lume, and you should be fine.

If you’re still having problems please email us via our contact page  and we’ll do our best to help you.

Also, if you’ve come across a bug where you can complete the game early, don’t worry, an update has been submitted to the App Store yesterday which will allow you to get the whole Lume experience!  Will post here when the update is live.

Thanks to all of you who are supporting Lume during it’s first forays onto the App Store!

Luke

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Lume is included in Indie Royale’s Valentine’s Bundle!

For the next four days, you can purchase Lume along with four other games:

1. Zeno Clash for: steam (pc)
2. Hoard for: steam (pc and mac)
   *BONUS* Includes individual keys for two DLC packs.
3. Lume for: windows, mac, linux, desura, steam (pc and mac)
4. Soulcaster for: windows, desura
5. BONUS: Soulcaster II

The Indie Royale Bundle is a fluctuating minimum price bundle, meaning that the minimum price goes up the more people that buy it! And if people pay more than the minimum price, it reduces the price for other buyers!

So grab the Love bundle at Indie Royale quick smart, and get a piece of the action!  And a piece of the Hoarding. And Soulcasting. And Luming, if that’s a word.

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Work on the sequel to Lume is afoot. And what a foot it is. This is like the Yeti of feet. I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited about a project. Thanks to the success of Lume and everyone’s fantastic support, we think we might be able to make the sequel the game we dream of, it’s going to be bigger, more beautiful and be more puzzling – in a good way *nods apologetically at those who tried for hours to solve Lume’s cupboard lock puzzle*.

There has been a lot of sketchbook work on the game so far, and one of the reasons I haven’t uploaded anything is that you don’t want to see scratchy doodles from the inside of my brain do you? You do? Well, okay here’s a little something.

I went to see the Russian Constructivism show at the Royal Academy in London – a fantastic exhibition full of wall-high photographs of powerful, sometimes almost abstract architecture, as well as small photos and drawings of little models. After a few minutes of awestruck wandering I realised I had no way of recording what I was seeing, no cameras allowed in there, and no sketchbook on me. So I raced out of there, checking first that they’d let me back in, and got my hands on a sketchbook and pencil from the gallery shop (it was difficult to find one that wasn’t a novelty bendy one, or oversized, or, bizarrely, covered in purple fur), then spent a happy few hours making sketches of things which interested me.

Hopefully you can see how we’re thinking of interesting shapes and dramatic camera angles – I seem to have scribbled ‘Imagine balancing here’ on one of them. So it’s been a lot of imagining, but we’ve also been translating these things into reality recently – we’ve been making some real models. I’ll post some pictures of them next.

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Sometimes you get weeks where everything seems to be happening at once, and, in this particular instance, that’s fantastic.  Right after our recent nomination at IGF, we’re delighted to discover that the highly respected folks at JayIsGames.com have nominated Lume for their Best Games of 2011.   And we need your help!  If you can head over to the site and vote for it that would be very kind of you!  And if you think it deserves the title ‘Game of the Year’ make sure to tick the box at the top of the page.  Apparently you can vote every day.  If you can do that that, and some might say that’s above and beyond the call of duty, we would furnish you wish something lavish.  A bit of early Lume concept art? Bits of the model we mangled with glue before we stuck it together?  We would rummage round the studio for you and see what we can find.

Thanks again you all for all your support for Lume!

Luke

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