But if you're stuck in front of Maya, perhaps, or just a screen, there's less to have a conversation with, and it disallows it to be a really interesting creative process. You do a bit and see how it looks, and it ends up a bit of a conversation. 'When you're making a painting, you don't plan every single brush stroke. We just loved the direct connection between brain, pencil.

If you put layers of technology in front of you all you're doing is hiding the artist, or hiding the medium, or it's more of a struggle to get that appear. 'Not because the speed, but because it's more truthful in some way. 'It's the quickest way to get our ideas down in a beautiful way,' he says of State of Play's methods. The atmosphere bleeds into the work - several people in the vicinity lend their talents and their tools to the making of Lumino City - and you sense that Whittaker, whose mother is an artist and whose father is a jewellery designer, has craft glue running through his veins. The pair work out of a Peckham studio that looks out over a cobbled cul-de-sac, a space they share with stained glass window makers and carpenters and a world away from the industrial edge lands most developers call home. It's one that's become integral to State of Play, a developer set up by Luke Whittaker and Katherine Bidwell just over five years ago. It's that aesthetic that keeps everything tied together, and that informs every aspect of Lumino City. The puzzles are as light as the adventure, though they've often a tactile, analogue edge in keeping with the tangible world: reel to reel tapes must be threaded in order, light boxes blended to create new colours and, in one brilliant scene, a Kowloon City-inspired building block is tugged at and manipulated in order to open up an entirely new path. Lumino City's an adventure game in which you play a young girl in search of her grandfather, a quest that takes you to the furthest reaches of this papercraft metropolis. It's a remarkable aesthetic, seen first in Lume and, later this year, to be fully expanded upon in Lumino City. They're real, tangible places you can poke around imagine holding Hyrule in your hands, seeing its fields and towns laid out like a model village, or being able to run your fingers across the contours of Mario Bros' 1-1. That's because State of Play makes its worlds not out of polygons and shaders but from cardboard and wood, slotting them all together and recording them via camera for players to explore. It's sitting in the corner, complete in miniature, begging to be touched. The world it's crafting isn't locked up on hard drives, floating on computer screens.

State of Play's studio is different: it's sawdust and craft glue, the pleasantly acrid tang of freshly cut wood. I don't know if I've ever noticed the odour of other development studios, but I guess they've all kind of smelt the same office blocks where new carpet and stale coffee mix together, an occasional hint of warm plastic seeping through. The aroma's the thing that hits you first.

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