LENS FLAIR

How developers are reinventing their worlds through the eye of a camera.

- CHRISTIAN DONLAN

The camera is just sitting there. Placed on a pile of rocks, its black plastic and dark glass are a perfect contrast to the white pebbles scattered all around, the pearly shore and the distant mountain dithering to grey. It would make a good picture, actually - and that's the first sign that you're going to enjoy this.

If you noticed that contrast, you're already thinking like a photographer. Now, pick up the camera. Advance along the shoreline. Wait for a shot to call out to you. The moment will be different for every player.

It was important for Matt Newell, the man who put that camera there on those rocks, that his game should not lead you towards each new picture. Rather than a work of concealed guidance, leaning on the tricks that decades of game development have honed, Lushfoil Photography Sim should unfold naturally in just the formless way in which it was made.

Before it was even a game, Lushfoil was a collection of places, modelled in Unreal Engine. "That was the base," Newell says, speaking from his home in Japan. "I had a handful of environments, and it wasn't necessarily a game at first." Once it was, though, the central mechanic was obvious.

After all, it was a love of photography that got Newell into games in the first place. That led him to a passion for screenshotting games such as Star Wars: Battlefront. And, when getting the right shot called for an angle available only in a mod, to tinkering with Unreal Engine, which in turn led to working in development. Lushfoil marks the point where all those roads reconnect.

However, when looking back at the path that led him here, Newell can't remember a pivotal moment when photography itself first clicked. And while he still takes his camera everywhere, he can't recall a shot that he's particularly pleased with. He's not that kind of photographer. Instead, photography is a continuum for Newell: an endless sweep of images, a way of being in the world.