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Interview with State of Play – developer of iOS game Lumino City

There are plenty of apps on the App Store that use a hand-made style of animation – but are there any that actually hand-make models, sets, and characters and package it all up in an iOS game? Lumino City certainly has.

Released towards the end of 2015 on the iPhone and iPad, developer State of Play dropped Lumino City on an unsuspecting App Store, to incredible acclaim. That acclaim even extended as far as Apple, which went on to place the TV version of this universal game at number 2 on its list of the best Apple TV games of 2015 – just imagine how impressive the animation would look on a fully-sized TV screen.

Now, in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, co-director at State of Play Katherine Bidwell has talked about the game, and why they chose this approach:

“We’re not natural 3D programmers. So it was a natural thing to try and make games in a different way.”

The point and click style adventure game follows the adventure of Lumi, who’s on a journey to find her kidnapped grandad, and is a widely expanded sequel to previous game Lume.

“We launched Lume to make sure we were able to sell this game and it was something people wanted – that we could even physically do it. It’s not giving [Lume] enough credit but it was kind of a proof of concept for this bigger city we always wanted to make.”

Find out more about how the game was made in the full interview, alongside more screenshots and images from a GameCity exhibition that featured Lumino City shortly before its release in November 2015.

Read our review of Lumino City.

Download Lumino City on the App Store for $4.99/£3.99