Lurking at Luma

Dear reader, lo and behold! I have once again surfaced from my never-ending pile of work to present you with another instalment of what some call the Chronicles, others the Rodblog and the remainder A Bloody Waste Of Time If You Ask Me (or at least, that would be the case if I hadn't already shot them all).

I'm still adventuring in a very geek-heavy environment and loving it to bits, despite the fact that I'm regularly settling for about four hours of sleep a night and fuelling my days with enough Mountain Dew to drown a fish (and you know that's intense because it's a fish). It's a labour of love, though: through a mixture of writing and game development, I'm simultaneously honouring both of my major career choices in one fell swoop of work and sleep-deprivation. I'm also going on some rather interesting field trips as a result.

Last Friday, I paid a visit to Luma, a design company in Johannesburg which just happens to make games as well. Their game development studio – known as Luma Arcade – has already been making waves in the local dev community with a few nice racing titles and mobile games. Now, however, they're kicking it up a notch and starting on development for the iPhone. Unfortunately, there's not terribly much that I can say about it because they're locked up in a non-disclosure agreement thing (they call it an NDA in fancy-speak) and they'll cut off my sensitive bits if I violate that, but it should suffice to say: “Yay!”

Fortunately, the Big Boy burger kid wasn't part of the NDA. So here he is. Yay!

Without divulging too much, I'm really excited about what Luma's getting up to now. Their first few games were okay: they covered new ground and paved the way well for the South African dev community, but they weren't breaking any barriers with regards to game creation as a whole. Now that I'm seeing some awesome concepts and a real one-up on their previous projects, I'm kinda keen to pump images, interviews and reviews of these guys into every possible media outlet at my disposal. Because I'm a Level 90 Journalist, at least on the odd occasions when I somehow manage to do things right.

The head honcho at Luma decided to make his face a part of the NDA at the last minute. He said it was because he looked silly. Tsk tsk.

Anyway, that's all I'm going to say. Mostly going to save the juicy details for people who will, you know, actually pay me to scribble them out. And I'm waiting on permission for some things anyway. In the meantime, I'll leave you with a little something I whipped up this morning. I call it Icebix:

Oh no, he's not ...

Oh he just DID!

The surprising conclusion: Weetbix in icecream tastes DELICIOUS! Patent pending.