Archive:
Well, it looks like the dust has settled.
Lumo 2’s initial crop of reviews, and YouTube videos, were about as bumpy as I was expecting. The game is Marmite because it’s very much laser-focused on, well, me. And possibly 50 year old gamers steeped in the same computer, magazine and video game pop-culture references. It’s parochial in a way that games don’t tend to be any more. Which is fine. That was the intention! Besides, I like Marmite. :)
Yeah, it’s a bit of a shame that the Metacritic is languishing below the first one, as I don’t believe for a second that it’s a “worse game”, but when you look at who was reviewing games 10 years ago, it’s no real surprise. We used to have magazines! And websites! And people my age used to work at them! The world’s moved on… What has been a delight is the reaction from the people who do like the game, and that’s far exceeded anything I hoped for, or heard from the first one. The 100% has got its hooks into a fair few people, and it’s been great fun to hear from the few who’ve rinsed it.
In the scheme of things, I think I’d rather make something polarising because, if you like it, you’re really really gonna like it, and I’m in a position where I don’t need to worry about pleasing all the people. I made it to put a grin on a certain set of people’s faces, and it looks like it’s done that. Mission accomplished.
Touch wood, but today might mark my last involvement with the game. I’ve just pushed up a patch for the PC SKU to add Inverted Y camera controls (sorry console peeps) and an extra setting for fullscreen modes and screen resolutions. There’s one definite bug in all skus that I’ve been made aware of, but it doesn’t appear to be game breaking, and I haven’t actually got reproduction steps for it, so that’s gonna remain unfixed. Meaning my time in Rider, touching the code, is over.
I’ve also, finally, set up the Lumo 2 Dev Journal on Itch.io. The final, glossy journal ended up at ~240 pages, which took me ages to layout. You can, of course, still read the whole thing for free here on the blog, but the PDF is available for £1.99 and despite my lack of chops in Affinity Publisher, it looks nice.
Apologies for any typos and bad grammar. I’d loved to have got a sub-editor and designer in to give it all a proper once over, but, well, time and money got in the way.
I’m going to push these final code changes to Perforce, Rar up the various dev directories, back up, and then remove it all from my hard drive. Lumo 2, you were a lot of fun. x
Musings, random thoughts, work in progress screenshots, and occasional swears at Unreal Engine's lack of documentation -- this is a rare insight into what happens when a supposedly professional game developer plans very little up-front, and instead follows where the jokes lead them.
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