Melbourne studio Lucernal is hard at work on its debut game Little Ruin – an isometric story-driven adventure. It’s been in the works for several years, with Lucernal’s duo dev team making progress on the project when their day jobs in architecture and teaching allow. Recently, we were able to chat with Lucernal’s Mark Fenollar and Fiona Johnson about Little Ruin’s design, influences and future.
WellPlayed: You’re working on your debut game Little Ruin – what’s the elevator pitch.
Fiona Johnson: Little Ruin is a story about growing up, difficult choices, and belonging. You’ll play as Isobel, a teenage girl entangled in the machinations of colonial civil unrest in a crumbling, war-ravaged society.
WP: How did the idea for Little Ruin come about? Are there any particular games that you took inspiration from?
Mark Fenollar: It started as an amorphous idea for a story that I’d been chipping away at for years but could never figure out what to do with it.
When I started working in architecture I was using game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine for real-time visualisation, and there was something so evocative about building an environment and getting to explore it. From there it seemed like a great idea to try to make a game!
I started testing out ideas for mechanics and structuring a narrative based on that story. I managed to rope Fi into getting involved and that’s when Little Ruin started to come together in earnest.
As far as games that have influenced us over the years, there are a few that stand out. Little Big Adventure is a big one. The story is quite dark and Orwellian but the world and its characters are vibrant and whimsical which I think helped to elicit empathy in the player. The isometric environments felt really cutting-edge at the time and I think they still hold up really well.
We loved the narrative flow of Oxenfree. The dialogue felt organic as the characters explored the island, and familiarised you with the characters and the setting without ever feeling overwhelming. Some other games that have been an influence are What Remains of Edith Finch, Night in the Woods and Firewatch. I’m still sad about what happened to Campo Santo.
WP: The game seems to have some European influence in terms of its setting, what made you go down this route?
MF: Our setting is fictional, but there’s a bit of a Mediterranean influence with the setting for a few reasons.
My parents are both immigrants. My mum is French and my Dad’s family emigrated to Australia as refugees from Algeria and Morocco during the Algerian War. My ancestors on that side were Catalan. I guess I’ve been using this project to loosely explore my heritage.
We’re also heavily influenced by Guillermo del Toro’s films set during the Spanish Civil War – The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, which also centre around youths trying to navigate a very adult conflict.
WP: Little Ruin has been in development for a few years now. How much has changed since you began working on it?
MF: The only substantial changes have been to the narrative. It started out as a linear narrative but we realised that given the nature of the scenarios Isobel is placed in, and the connection we’re hoping to form between her and the player, it made sense to give the player a lot more agency.
We’d also set out to tell a much longer story but we haven’t been able to get a publisher on board, so we needed to reduce the scope into something we could manage on a limited budget. That’s ended up working out for the best because the narrative is much tighter now, and I think more effective.
WP: Little Ruin’s protagonist is a young teenage girl named Isobel. Why did you choose to have the story centre around a teenage girl?
FJ: Teenage characters are fun to write, but also an enjoyable world view to assume as a player. We are inspired by YA fiction, which often deals with heavy subject matter in intelligent and creative ways. It isn’t patronising.
We are also drawing on ‘Coming of Age’ film and television, there’s a certain nostalgia that that genre of media has – there’s something about recalling that freedom of youth, the potential to go on an adventure with your friends.
There’s a plasticity to teenage characters. They have a sense of what is going on, sometimes this is expressed as a naive false confidence which can be polarised. They know that something is up – but they don’t have the full picture. So the player and the player character can have a shared journey of discovery.
WP: What themes are you exploring with the game’s story? Why these themes?
FJ: In terms of the story, we are broadly exploring themes of empathy, trauma and belonging.
This preoccupation has emerged really from the combination of Mark’s personal background and my research background in settler colonialism through my PhD. I focused my research on Australia and New Zealand, and how the political ecologies of settler colonialism have set up policy contexts for contemporary designers, both architects and landscape architects, operating in large-scale urban renewal projects. I spent a lot of time comparing legislation and policy. In my research and my teaching in landscape architecture, I have spent a lot of time mapping the spatial histories of cities around the world – and how they interact with society, culture, politics, economics.
Little Ruin was an opportunity to combine some things we both cared about through a creative project. It’s also probably a response to watching both Australian and international politics throughout history, and to the general lack of empathy that has been apparent.
WP: The game’s Steam description mentions that forming an ideological position will impact the story. Can you explain this and how players will make this decision?
FJ: We have discussed this a lot at length – we wanted to avoid thinking about player choice as moral. There is a tendency for this to be quite binary for character progression and the ways in which narratives branch.
As an individual within a community, the player navigates socio-political dynamics through the mechanics of interpersonal relationships – your friendships. You have to decide where Isobel’s allegiances might lie – and these choices affect how people react to you. The ideological worldview formed by the player becomes the frame through which to interpret choice.
It might be more accurate to say that the player’s set of beliefs about the game – their ideological worldview – is really framed by how they interpret the knowledge that they gain about the world and what it means to be in that world – so really it isn’t just about ideology, but also ontology and epistemology.
WP: The game’s environments look incredible. I am guessing your architecture background has helped a lot in this regard?
MF: Thanks very much. It can be a double-edged sword. We’ve gone to great pains to create a world that evokes a strong sense of place, and I think our backgrounds have helped there. Certainly in relation to structure, materiality, proportion, circulation, etc. Even if players don’t notice the detail, it’s important that everything feels right.
Our art style is fairly stylised, however, and sometimes that training can be a little rigid. Learning how and when to break from that is an ongoing process.
WP: What was the reasoning behind choosing an isometric viewpoint?
MF: It just started out that way. We’ve always been drawn to games with an isometric or orthographic projection. There’s a certain nostalgia to it, but it’s much more than that.
We did toy with the idea of a third-person view early on. I’d built a scene with a large staircase and I wanted it to feel majestic and imposing, which worked really well in isometric where I could frame it accordingly. But switching to third-person the camera would just whip around as I moved up and down, so that was settled.
In a game like Little Ruin where the world is as important as the characters, the isometric projection allows us to frame and curate each shot much like a theatre set, without any hierarchy or camera distortion to the proportions. Our hope is that the framing and set dressing will allow the player to passively absorb much of the context as they move through the world.
From a technical standpoint, it can be a bit more performative because we’re not drawing everything to the horizon, only what’s in the frame. It means we can be a bit more generous with our polycounts and so on. Because it’s orthographic, we’re able to pre-render the environments which gives us a lot more control of the overall look because we can edit an entire scene in Photoshop, not just individual elements.
WP: The choices we make in the game, do they impact the story?
FJ: Yes they do! We want players to feel very strongly that they can choose to make what they think is the best decision in a given scenario, and to live with the consequences of that. It isn’t about just one decision, but a sequence of scaled decisions that aggregate as the game progresses. The expression of those differences is subtle in some instances and builds towards quite different endings to the story.
WP: When it comes to the gameplay, what can players expect from Little Ruin?
MF: A lot of the focus is on engaging with other characters and exploring the environment to propel the story. We have ‘puzzles’ in a sense but they’re very light-on – they’re designed more to make the world feel tangible than to stump the player and break the flow of the narrative.
WP: I know the game is still in development, but do you have an idea of how long the game will be?
MF: Our best guess is about 6 hours, give or take, for a single play-through. We’re designing the environments in a way that rewards exploration, but we know that some players will jam the ‘Run’ button down and power past a lot of it.
WP: Will there be multiple endings?
MF: There are indeed. As Fi mentioned, each ending will be in keeping with the choices and interactions made throughout the adventure, some will bring about quite drastic narrative departures and others more nuanced.
We know most players are likely to play just once, so we want the conclusion they reach to feel warranted, but there are enough variables at play that we’re hoping people will be curious enough to play again.
WP: So far, Little Ruin has been announced for PC. Are you hoping to bring it to any consoles or mobile devices?
FJ: We’d love to, but we’re going to focus on PC for now, just within our scope. I think it would lend itself to mobile given the UI and the types of interactions, but it’s not a trivial thing to port to, and it is really hard for indies to justify in terms of the economics of development.
Little Ruin is really well suited to console – control pad is our preferred experience, although we’ve designed it to be played in whichever way works for you.
WP: Is there a release window that you’re targeting?
FJ: We are targeting a Q4 2026 release – perhaps optimistically. It’s a continual challenge because we are indie but also a hybrid studio in the types of work we do. We are balancing the timing against other commitments and opportunities. On the other hand, we don’t want to work on Little Ruin forever so we are pretty determined to get as close to this as we can.
WP: Thanks for the chat. All the best with the game’s development.
