In the eastern Melbourne suburb of Croydon, the digital architecture design company Lucernal is moonlighting as a game development studio and has been slowly working on its debut game Little Ruin. This is no hobby though – Lucernal’s evolution has allowed for a release of creativity that has built up over many years of work controlled by what its clients needed. But now Lucernal is in the driver’s seat, and game design felt like a natural extension of its work – that and its founders have a strong passion for video games.
Founded in late 2016 by partners in both business and life, Mark Fenollar and Fiona Johnson, Lucernal started as an architectural visualisation studio – a company that specialises in producing realistic renders of building projects not yet constructed. These are the people tasked with making you believe how good a place could look so that you’ll buy one before it’s built. It’s certainly no easy feat; it takes years of practice, training, and a keen eye for detail.
Johnson’s academic background is as a landscape architect, but she has spent most of her career in research and teaching at universities in Melbourne. About five years ago she completed a PhD in landscape architecture, with her research focused on the production of space in Australia and New Zealand. Johnson was specifically looking into urban renewal projects against the politics of settler colonialism and reconciliation, and it’s proven valuable insight when it came to Little Ruin’s world building. Fenollar, meanwhile, is a veteran of the architecture industry with many years of experience working at various firms as a 3D artist before co-founding Lucernal.
Little Ruin
Both Fenollar and Johnson are lifelong gamers, with Fenollar sharing that the first console his household had was a ColecoVision. However, one title from his youth that has played a part in his design influence is Zim Sala Bim, an adventure title released on the Commodore 64 from Melbourne-based developer Melbourne House.
“It was a text parser. I got quite stuck and I could never progress pass a certain point but I’d go back to every so often and play that.”
Like many kids who grew up in the formative years of video games, adventure titles like King’s Quest and Police Quest from Sierra On-Line, and the Lucas Arts games left their mark. But Little Big Adventure is one game that has helped shape Little Ruin.
“There’s something in that game that has informed Little Ruin – in that it was all handled with levity, the art style was quite beautiful,” says Fenollar.
“It wasn’t your typical everything is brown/grey dystopia which made you care about the inhabitants more.”
Johnson, on the other hand, says that her family had Macintosh LC – the first colour screen Mac computer. But over the years, Johnson has developed an eclectic taste in video games, enjoying everything from management and strategy sims to recent narrative-driven titles like Oxenfree and Harold Halibut.
The idea to get into game design came from Fenollar’s time working in retail, where he would write story ideas in a notebook but had no outlet to bring them to life. Initially Fenollar considered turning them into a graphic novel, but his lack of drawing prowess put a fork in that plan. It wasn’t until he started playing with Unity and Unreal Engine that he realised that video games were a great medium to express his ideas.
After getting the basics down pat, such as the isometric perspective and the narrative outline, Johnson and Fenollar knew they couldn’t do it all themselves, so they decided to bring on some contractors to produce some concept art and help with the programming.
Some of the characters of Little Ruin
Fenollar says that the aim wasn’t to rush the final product out the door, but instead to improve their chances of securing funding from VicScreen. Something that they weren’t confident in at all.
“We were from outside the industry, so we weren’t sure how open it was to people from outside,” explains Fenollar.
However, the pair were successful, securing funds that helped them create a vertical slice.
“Being outsiders, our expectations are set up from a different industry, so there’s an expectation that you won’t succeed the first time you go for something, and therefore you go back and you revise it and go again. So, we were very shocked when we got funding the first time,” says Johnson.
The pair are extremely grateful for the support that VicScreen has given them, but are equally surprised that such a program exists.
“It’s quite unique to have that enabling infrastructure in place for developers to even enter the industry from the outside,” Johnson adds.
Although the story of Little Ruin is a fictional setting, Fenollar says that in part it’s inspired by his family’s history, with his father’s side of the family fleeing the Algerian war in 1960. Sadly, Fenollar isn’t close with his family, so they may not see his creative endeavour come to fruition, and Johnson says that Little Ruin has allowed them to unpack “how we identify ourselves and our relationship to place.”
Despite starting pre-production many years ago, development has been a slow process due to Lucernal’s visualisation work taking priority. After all, it is what allows them to keep the lights on and work on Little Ruin.
Fiona at Sydney’s South by Southwest
They’ve been able to scale back on projects to give more time to Little Ruin, but they know that without enough funding they wouldn’t be able to focus on Little Ruin full time. It’s something that they would love to do if it were possible, as it allows them to stretch their legs creatively.
“Property developer-driven is not the most romantic work to be doing – it’s property marketing, and it has its moments, but the creativity is quite limited,” admits Fenollar.
Although it may be lacking in excitement, both Johnson and Fenollar admit that their visualisation work has given them the tools to widen their scope into other areas. It’s also influenced a bunch of design choices, like designing the game with an isometric perspective.
“It allows us to frame every shot exactly the way that we would like to and style it the way we would like to so that we can curate what the player is seeing,” says Fenollar.
“And that’s from our visualisation background, where that’s what we do – we curate the image to sell the product,” adds Johnson.
Johnson emphasises the commonalities between the two creative fields, explaining that the two share some of the same fundamentals but the application is slightly different.
“Landscape architects design playgrounds and open worlds – they’re working in open worlds outside with dynamic systems.”
Funding is something that Lucernal has been chasing, with Fenollar describing pitching as a “necessary evil” for a lot of developers but admits that the current financial climate in the games industry is hard.
Johnson is quite pragmatic when it comes to relationships with potential investors, stating that nowadays it’s best to take a long-term view.
“Maybe it’s not this game, maybe it’s the next game. You don’t know when you’re going to be sitting opposite the person who might end up working with you.”
Little Ruin concept art
The pair says they’ve had some conversations that have almost led to partnerships, as well as some discussions with companies that don’t exist anymore. The biggest challenge has been pitching as Lucernal, a pre-existing business that has kept them going over the years. It’s not so much a put-off to publishers, but Johnson and Fenollar are adamant about protecting the business from going under.
“We’re conservative and the person on the other side of the table is conservative, so getting to a mutual point isn’t necessarily the easiest,” says Johnson.
Fenollar reveals that they pitched to a few parties late last year, and the “tone” of the conversations has shifted, with more publishers chasing cheaper games with a hook, something that they say Little Ruin does not have.
Like a lot of indie devs, Lucernal started with more ambitious plans before scaling them back to fit within their means. They flirted with the idea of making it a third-person game but ultimately they knew that it would be biting off more than they could chew, especially as first-time devs doing it on a part-time basis.
As a narrative-driven game, one of the biggest challenges the team has faced with Little Ruin has been how to accommodate players when they don’t follow the way the game is designed to be played.
“We have a few walkie-talkie sections in our game but people like to run off,” laughs Fenollar.
“As a designer it’s frustrating because you have to account for that, you kinda want this conversation to happen as it’s important to the story, but the player just trots off to wherever while everyone else hangs back talking. But we’ve decided to make that a mechanic, and those people will respond to you if you keep running off on them, as your friends would in real life might do if they’re having a conversation and you dart off without saying anything.”
Some of Lucernal’s visualisation work
Even though development has been slow, Johnson and Fenollar admit they’ve learned heaps over the years and improved their game design skills, and Little Ruin will be a better game for it. Johnson’s teaching has also given the project some extra perspective, revealing that it can be energising when speaking with younger people that are passionate about creative ideas.
Despite Little Ruin being in development for a few years, Fenollar and Johnson are in no rush to see it released, putting a tentative Q4 2026 release window on the project. Truth be told, it’s a decision that has been made for them. But the pair are happy to continue with their part-time work for now, believing that this approach gives them time to make the best game possible while learning as they go.
You can’t help but marvel at the risk that Fenollar and Johnson took when they decided to try their hand at game design. It’s the type of move that you rarely see at big game companies, and instead of playing it safe and continuing with their visualisation work, they decided to spread their wings and satiate their creative hunger. We can only hope that Little Ruin is successful enough for Lucernal to keep exploring its artistic side in the future.
