For a game about constantly fighting off certain space-related death, the game features a bright neon color palette that creates a whimsical atmosphere and captures imaginations – so much so that Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime has been named a nominee in the upcoming Independent Games Festival for Excellence in Visual Art.

“Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is a two-player co-op micro-platformer set inside a neon spaceship,” said animator and designer Matt Hammill. “You and a friend work together manning gun turrets, lasers, shields and thrusters to fight off hordes of space baddies, explore randomly generated galaxies, and stave off a vacuumy demise. The game’s a mish-mash of a bunch of childhood influences, but nothing so much as that one scene in Star Wars where Han and Luke are scrambling through the Millennium Falcon to get to those sweet, sweet turret stations.”

Hammill first got together with artist Jamie Tucker and programmer Adam Winkels at TOJam 2011. The team created a competitive multiplayer game called Shuriken Skies, but the team got the itch to dive into co-op after seeing some of their fellow competitors’ entries. “At the same time, Damian Sommer made a really great co-op game called A Friendship in Four Colours,” said Tucker. “Playing that, and also Spooky Squid’s Cephalopods Co-op Cottage Defence, we sort of vowed that the next game we’d make would be co-op. Additionally, in Toronto, we have almost weekly social events where these kind of games are playable, one being Games with Friends that is run out of Bento Miso, a co-working space where we have developed most of the game. It was actually where we showed off this current version of Lovers for the first time.”

Partners in Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime must venture back and forth between the space vessel’s four stations — the red turrets, the blue shields, the orange helm, and the yellow “Yamato” laser (which Tucker refers to as the Holy Eff button). Cooperative play becomes a major factor here, as partners must communicate effectively to bounce back and forth between whichever station needs the most attention. This is the best way to fend off some of the strange creatures approaching the vessel, many of which Hammill admits the team is still designing. “Some of the baddies we’ve got so far include little Sputnik-inspired drones–these guys fire puny little bullets and you can laugh at them while they explode around you, unless they’re in a pack. Then there are the jellybombers — evil robot jellyfish littering the universe with exploding egg-mines. And as the game progresses and you explore different regions of space, you’ll come across weirder and more dangerous creatures, too.”

With such a frenetic pace and the grim specter of getting blown to bits in space, the neon color scheme does come off as slightly odd. Hammill explains the reason for this strange dichotomy. “We were all sci-fi fans growing up, from Robotech to Aliens to Heinlein to Warhammer 40K,” he said. “Since we were already borrowing so much from our influences in this whole dudes-in-a-ship-shooting-guns-at-aliens concept, we wanted to try going in the exact opposite direction from grim darkness for our aesthetic. Plus it was a way we could pay homage to a totally different pile of influences, from artists Scott Benson and Chris Ware to Eyewitness Books cutaways, Powerpuff Girls and Katamari Damacy.”

The team is excited to see their art style bring them IGF recognition. Their nomination will also bring Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime a spot in the Steam library. While PC may not be the ideal platform for co-op games, Asteroid Base is happy to see the number of steps that PC gaming has taken over the past few years in regards to this aspect of gaming. “PC’s are a great platform for indies, because they’re so low-cost for development and distribution,” said Hammill. “But local multiplayer has never been easy just because of hardware, which is a shame, because there are a ton of interesting local multiplayer indie games.”

Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is still a long way from its final release, but look for it to arrive on PC and Mac as soon as it’s ready. However, Tucker also notes that the team will also look to bring the game to Unity and Linux, as well. “Additionally, we’d love for it to come out on consoles, too,” Tucker added. “It feels really good on a big screen with a controller in your hand and a friend beside you.”

Senscape looks to continue this trend with their upcoming point-and-click horror adventure, Asylum. To learn more about it, I talked to Senscape director, Agustín Cordes.

“I like to describe Asylum as a psychological horror adventure,” said Cordes, describing the game. “It does sound cliché, but it couldn’t be truer in this case — Asylum is ‘pure’ horror in a sense that fear comes from mood rather than shock. Horror is often described as a mental response — the horrifying moment that comes with a dreadful realization. I like to define horror as the entire process, though — the anticipation of that final revelation, with all the irrational fear it involves. I say irrational, because often the root of your fears aren’t clear. Asylum is like a constant buildup that mostly works in your head. All the elements in the game come together to create this chilling atmosphere that crawls under your skin. There will be a few shocking sequences, yes, but the game is mostly about what you can’t see and only feel.”

Asylum’s frontman is shrouded in mystery. Cordes describes him as a former patient of the equally mysterious Hanwell Mental Institute, who returns to seek answers about his past there. His life is plagued with fuzzy visions of his past there. Everything about the plot beyond that is purposely being kept under wraps.

The other major details about Asylum surround the institution itself. Cordes reveals that its backstory is based on locales from H.P. Lovecraft stories, while its design is based on more contemporary sources. “We researched dozens of websites, studied literally hundreds of photographs and paid a visit to a couple of real mental institutes to understand how they function, and also get a ‘proper’ vibe about these places and their inhabitants. Most of what you’ll see in the game is inspired after real locations and their protocols. The design itself is inspired by games like Silent Hill — gritty, dark and foreboding.”

With the entirety of Asylum taking place within the institution, Cordes wanted to make sure that exploration would be a key element. That’s why Hanwell is built to the tune of 100 rooms and a basement. “Part of the allure of the game is to give players the feeling of actually exploring a lifelike vintage asylum,” he explained. “We’ve been darned serious about this from the beginning — we want to make you feel like you’re inside this asylum with virtually no restrictions to explore it. The structure has been painstakingly modeled after real blueprints and we went to extreme lengths to make it feel ‘correct.’ That is, it’s a building that could well function as a real asylum. People that love to practice so-called ‘urban exploring’ (an often illegal hobby of trespassing in abandoned buildings or ruins) have taken interest in the game because of this.”

The institution in Asylum will lend itself to several horror conventions, which will mainly go beyond the basic idea of suspense. “Asylum aims to create this general feeling of uneasiness and dread by pure mood,” Cordes added. “You can’t say you’re endangered like in most horror games, but it’s about making progress in the story while coming to horrifying realizations about the Hanwell Institute. There will be many unexpected twists that literally will make you rethink the entire game. I believe this focus on story and true psychological horror is what makes Asylum a unique game today.”

To help grant Senscape a sense of freedom in the development process, the studio created a new engine from the ground-up, calling it Dagon. Cordes says it was created out of necessity, as Unity wasn’t providing the team with what they were looking for. “We do love to have as much control as possible over every aspect of the game,” Cordes said. “Our own engine gives us that power. Over time, the expectations of the project grew a lot and now we’ve decided to give the engine for free and eventually open source it. We want to build a strong community around it.” Though Dagon was crafted for Asylum, Cordes points out the engine’s flexibility and that it can support most types of first-person adventures, with third-person support coming down the line.

Cordes says there’s still a lot of work to do before Asylum is ready. It’s targeted for a 2013 release, with much of that relying on a Kickstarter campaign. Look for it to launch on PC, Mac, and Linux, with an iPad release coming shortly thereafter.

The formula has proven to be so engaging that it is among the nominees for the 2013 Independent Games Festival’s Excellence In Design award. To learn more about the game, I talked to the game’s two designers, David Scamehorn and Alexander Baard.

“It’s a game about ____,” said Scamehorn. “It’s as much about competition as it is about cooperation. Its mechanics were designed to encourage players to selfishly grief one another in order to leverage their influence over the ship, as well as boost their own score while trying to keep everybody alive at the same time. Super Space ____ was built to be a loud and wild pick-up-and-play party game — a game where both the people playing and the people watching can enjoy the game simultaneously.”

The couch co-op aspect is the major draw for Super Space _____, a mechanic that Baard says is inspired by Messhof’s dueling game, Nidhogg. “We saw the crowd it was pulling and its Nuovo win and really wanted to do a local multiplayer game after that,” he added.

Scamehorn hopes that Super Space _____ can bring back the spirit of playing games locally with friends. “The disappearance of couch co-op and local multiplayer games in general can most likely be attributed to the advancement of online capabilities in game consoles and computers over the past decade,” he explained. “It seems people have forgotten how much fun just playing games in the same room with real people can be. This is something I wanted to bring back to games, something that the indie scene recently seems to be collectively reviving with local multiplayer games like Hokra, Samurai Gunn, and many others. I really wanted to design a game around the oxymoron of “involuntary teamwork”, where cooperation is a must in order to compete against one another and play the game.”

Super Space _____ isn’t quite ready for release, but it’s gone around to several events–including PAX and IndieCade–with playable builds. Random teams of four have managed to get the hang of the game quickly and make it quite far. Scamehorn notes that anyone who goes hands-on with the game will likely see most of its content through the first playthrough, provided they wind up on a good team. He hopes to have new waves ready for the game’s final release — enough to provide players with fresh content for each new session.

Beyond its cooperative element, Super Space _____ is meant to be a competitive experience. “You strike a balance between competition and cooperation in this game, which I think sets it apart from the score of 2D shooters out there,” said Baard. “You’re both motivated by self-interest and self-preservation, figuring out how important those variables are to you and your teammates is what makes the experience interesting.”

“Subtle dynamics like sacrificing potentially life-saving bomb pickups in order to disperse and steal other players’ weapons are what make the games competitive element intrinsically interesting,” Scamehorn added. “Without mechanics that allow players to make these kinds of decisions, the game would most likely just be another shooter.”

Taking Super Space _____ to events across the country have provided many opportunities for feedback. Occasionally, Scamehorn and Baard receive some useful criticisms — or at the very least, some entertaining anecdotes. “People are way too nice at festivals to offer any real feedback,” Baard said. “I think the best feedback is criticism. Our best feedback always comes from kids, because they have no social filter. This one kid was playing our game with some friends and he was not having a good time. His 3 friends were laughing and jumping up and down, and he was shouting to them about how bad the game was. Eventually he put the controller down and shouted at the top of his lungs ‘this game is worse than Sonic ‘06!’ and stormed off in a huff. Kids like him offer the best feedback. You don’t even have to talk to them, just watch them and see what their reactions are to reveal the highs and lows of your game.”

Even in the face of such scathing critiques, Super Space _____ has done very well for itself. The developer duo was shocked to learn that it was among the list of finalists at this year’s Independent Games Festival. “We’ve submitted and were rejected from a lot of things, so the cycle had become routine to us,” said Baard. “When you don’t get an email before the venue’s shortlist is announced, it’s a bad sign. I was eating breakfast in the cafe at DigiPen on Monday, saw on Gamasutra that the IGF noms were announced and the blood sort of drained from my face. I had come to DigiPen specifically because I wanted to score an IGF nomination and, throughout the development of Super Space _____, I was reminded of how unlikely that outcome would be. Surprise, surprise.”

Without online support, it’s difficult to gauge how well Super Space _____ would do in the marketplace. Baard and Scamehorn admit that not many PC players will find themselves plugging four Xbox 360 controllers into their desktop. However, the CES unveiling of the Xi3 Piston (a.k.a. the Steam Box) offers indie developers like them a glimmer of hope. “Something like the Steam Box means that indie games like ours could become commercially viable,” Scamehorn said. “We’ve heard indies have had a lot of trouble selling their games on the big three consoles.”

Super Space _____ was originally set for a winter release, but it has been pushed back to a spring 2013 release for PC. Baard says that this ultimately is best for everyone. “That’s good news because it ultimately means a better game,” he concluded.

Undaunted, the crew has moved their focus towards desktop gaming with their next title, Chasm. To learn more, I spoke to Discord’s James Petruzzi.

“Chasm is a 2D roguelike Metroidvania-style platformer,” said Petruzzi. “The two major games I’m looking at design-wise are Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and the original Diablo. You play a soldier returning home from war when you get trapped in a snowy little mining town. You find out the miner’s breached an ancient temple under the town and awoke a great sleeping evil. If you ever want to get home, your only option is to travel through the mines into the temple and figure out what’s going on.”

Players in Chasm start out outside the snowy mining town of Karthas. The town has undergone a major calamity, and the player must embark on a quest through the area’s mines. Players soon find a path to a temple that miners have broken through to, leading to a change of scenery. The temple is divided into different thematic areas with three randomly-generated floors with an exit to the next area and a boss battle. “We want to keep the atmosphere dark, but also interesting,” Petruzzi added. “Don’t be surprised to stumble into a section of the temple overtaken by jungle or something similarly unexpected.”

With treacherous terrain afoot, players will have to equip themselves with weaponry and magic. Chasm will feature standard equipment, like armor, rings, and swords. The game will also allow players to dual-wield items, making use of both of their hands. Petruzzi notes that players can wield a sword and shield, spellbook and potion, or even a sword and axe, just to name a few examples. These combinations will come in handy against the temples themed enemies, which will be revealed in greater detail as Chasm inches closer to release.

Chasm also represents a change in art style for Discord, with a move to pixel art. “I knew from the start I wanted to do a pixel art game,” Petruzzi explained. “That’s what I grew up with, and am seemingly nostalgic about. Even with the nostalgia, though, if pixel art is done right, it can be just as stunning as traditional painting. Also, after doing something as complex and technical as Take Arms, it’s awesome to take a step back and have the confines of a 320×180 resolution. It not only forces you to be creative, but think about every pixel on the screen.”

While Discord is poised to mix together genres with Chasm, Petruzzi recognizes that pleasing fans of these genres may prove to be a tall task. “I know the roguelike fans will want a hardcore experience and the Metroid folk are just looking for a good romp through an awesome environment, so it’ll be a balancing act for sure,” he said. “My number one priority is to keep the gameplay as fun as possible. Everything else just has to fit in where it can. Some of the obvious ties to the roguelike genre is our use of procedurally-generated dungeons that are different each new game, random loot drops with possible unique statuses, and shrines to find. Gameplay-wise, I’m trying to keep the experience authentic, and staying pretty close to what Symphony of the Night did. I’ve spent a ton of time studying their stats, damage, equipment, and level systems. There’s a ton to learn when you dig deeper and start seeing why they made certain decisions. I’ll definitely be building on Symphony though with a proper magic system that will hopefully be unveiled in the next video.”

There’s no set release date for Chasm, but Petruzzi hopes the game will be ready for a 2013 release. Look for it to arrive on PC, Mac, and Linux.

That’s the path that Joe Houston has taken, creating Roxlou Games and starting work on his debut title, a turn-based strategy game called Unwritten.

Unwritten’s jump into the turn-based strategy world focuses on variety and permanent decisions. Players guide a nomadic clan and cross perilous, randomly-generated tundra to get to God Mountain, where the clan believes their god lives. It’s an artistic take on Balinese tradition, using detailed hand-drawn art and shadow puppets.

“The premise started after I finished Dishonored and was reflecting on the challenges the design team faced in making a game with meaningful choice,” said Houston. “There’s this huge effort required to not only give the player a choice that affects the world, but then to also communicate to them what is different and why. For example, a player can’t really tell just by playing the game that ‘this rat right here wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t poisoned the distillery,’ so you have to try and tell them without being too overt. It then struck me — what if the decision itself tuned into a physical object that you could carry around and use to play the game? No need to communicate that the choice is meaningful, because the player is interacting directly with it. That was the seed that became Unwritten, growing out into this pervasive theme about storytelling and personal identity.”

Unwritten is very serious about permanent consequences, utilizing elements of roguelike games like FTL. Players carry around any decisions they make, with each one becoming a “story fragment” token. These tokens represent the cultural history of the clan and ultimately help influence what happens upon reaching God Mountain.

“Much of the game takes place on a hex grid map,” explains Houston. “As you go, you can interact with ‘story event’ tiles that bring up this interactive tableau acted out with shadow puppets. This represents a difficult decision your clan had to make on that day. In one example, you meet an old man and his son alone on the tundra and they ask you to give them the blood of a roxlou (these llama-like animals your clan uses as currency). You can choose to oblige them in exchange for the son as a slave, leave them both to die, or take them with you to safety. Whichever decision you make turns into a token that you take with you and they all have positive and negative connotations on the tundra — saving the man and his son together is a sign of kindness, but also of weakness according to the people that live in this harsh environment.”

As that example indicates, Unwritten will also see players interacting with other clans also making their way towards God Mountain, which leads to another major game mechanic. “As you progress, you find you need to trade and ally with other clan leaders along the way,” Houston adds. “This is done via a ‘story bout,’ which is basically a diplomacy minigame representing two leaders sharing the histories of their people. In the story bout, your most notorious or well-known story fragments are called up and you have to arrange them into this dialog tree. Your most notorious fragment is always at the top and you always start by telling the other leader about it and gauging their reaction. It then progresses with you deciding which fragment to use next, trying to steer the bout towards friendship or intimidation. The story fragment mechanic actually has a number of other uses, but this is the core.”

Various aspects of Unwritten, such as the story fragments and story bouts, help highlight the ideas of identity and oral tradition as major themes. These themes not only serve to shape the clan that’s currently venturing towards God Mountain, but also can affect future playthroughs. “Storytelling is a central theme, as evidenced with the shadow puppets and clan leader characters that are inspired by oral storytelling traditions of cultures around the world,” said Houston. “We also have some mechanics that play on the way stories are told and then exaggerated. We’re playing with this mechanic where, once per game, you can send a story fragment home to your people. If you do, then your next playthrough can be as the next generation of that clan. The fragment you sent home now grows into a ‘legend,’ increasing both its positive and negative aspects. You could keep passing that fragment along, making it grow bigger and bigger, but it’s not only growing more potent but also more volatile.”

Houston estimates that a successful playthrough will run about four to five hours. Of course, like any roguelike, failure will occur more often than not. However, the team is looking into tying playthroughs together to give the player the impression that even their failures make some sort of impact.

Unwritten represents a whole new atmosphere for Houston. While he worked with experienced developers for Dishonored, his two team members for Unwritten (artist Lee VanWallene and musician Julian Culme-Seymour) have never been a part of a gaming project. Houston cites some of the ups and downs involved in this transition. “A potential downside is that you end up iterating on things more than you might with someone that has done something a thousand times before,” he said. “However, it’s also easier to make these wild, weird jumps, because there aren’t any hangups there. Since Unwritten is, in a word, weird, that has really worked to our advantage. My other team members are also both dependable and professional with plenty of experience in their fields, being only new to the game industry itself.”

Roxlou’s debut effort is set to arrive on PC in August 2013. Houston also hopes the game’s Kickstarter will raise enough to make a Mac and Linux version possible, as well.

Mechanical music boxes and coin-operated dioramas seems like an unlikely inspiration for a video game, but the folks at Mousechief have adapted the style of the Musée Mécanique and turned it into their upcoming PC release, 7 Grand Steps.

7 Grand Steps tells the stories of family generations through the rise of western civilization by using board game mechanics. The game is about survival and raising successive generations that overcome the various challenges of the changing ages, giving players a sense of what family ancestry means. It’s an unconventional presentation and one that I asked Mousechief’s Keith Nemitz about.

“Most developers start making a game based upon a genre or mechanic,” Nemitz explains. “7 Grand Steps started from an experience I had while reading a book. Sarum, by Edward Rutherfurd, is an exemplary historical novel that tells about a few family lines living for several thousand years at a very specific location. I’m a big fan of Civilization, but Sid Meier’s game is about the one percent, those who rule the rest of us. I thought a game about family generations, including rulers, throughout the ages would be fascinating.”

In constructing 7 Grand Steps, Nemitz tows a delicate line between narrative unfolding through gameplay and through traditional storytelling methods. “I spent a year trying different mechanics,” he added. “I wanted one that felt like striving in life. You could say that most games are about striving. The “two steps forward, one step back” mechanic I settled on felt like a great basis for emergent narrative, progressing through a life. Certain aspects of a narrative are expressed by gameplay instead of by storytelling. I had to figure out which aspects could be told in gameplay and which needed to be written. For example, the narrative arc in 7 Grand Steps is told in gameplay, but details of lives and environments and situations are written.”

7 Grand Steps unfolds over a series of turns. Players allocate resources, represented by tokens. These tokens can be used to advance (take a step forward), raise children, sacrifice progress (take a step back), or generate more tokens. Larger game events soon unfold, having the player find a mate, brave rites of passage, acquire or attempt family legends, and play ruling games.

Nemitz further explains how the Musée Mécanique helped influence 7 Grand Steps’ style, saying that it was originally suggested by Mousechief’s art director, Bill Stoneham. “We took a ferry to the San Francisco wharf and filled a camera with shots of the mechanical museum’s wonderful 20’s and 30’s era gaming cabinets,” Nemitz said. “He thought it would provide a timeless context for 7 Grand Steps. Fifty years from now, it’ll still look and feel like it does today. Sadly, so many good games look dated after just a couple years.”

While Nemitz points out that most players strive to rise and fall, he also notes that player families can live however they see fit. They can choose which legends to pursue and can handle emergencies–like famines and war–however they’d like. A full playthrough will last 15-20 hours, with the decision on which legend to pursue most influencing the game’s narrative.

The unique style of 7 Grand Steps has led to the game being named a Nuovo Award finalist at this year’s Independent Games Festival. It was an announcement that took the crew at Mousechief by surprise, as Nemitz confesses that he didn’t think the game had a good chance at it.

Look for 7 Grand Steps to arrive on PC and Mac this spring with a Linux release coming shortly thereafter. In the meantime, players can try out the demo on the game’s website.

With 2013 looking to be the year it arrives, I reached out to the game’s lead designer, David Board, to learn some more details.

Lifeless Planet’s story is shrouded in mystery and intrigue, stemming from the game’s unnamed main character landing on the seemingly-barren planet. “When you arrive, you find all life has died off and the planet has become barren and desolate,” he said. “Then while searching for your missing crew, you uncover evidence of prior human habitation — a Soviet-era Russian town. Later, you spot a lone individual, ‘Aelita,’ who only speaks Russian and who seems afraid of you and runs away. For some unknown reason, she leaves glowing green footprints on the soil as she walks, and you can use these to try to safely traverse the inhospitable planet. So you follow the woman, seeking answers, trying to solve puzzles and uncover the mystery of the lifeless planet.”

Board describes Lifeless Planet as a throwback to some of his favorite adventure games. The aim is mainly to revive the atmosphere of exploring (and escaping) a mysterious world, solving puzzles along the way. Board recounts some of his favorite moments in games, reaching the next area and stepping out into a spectacular view after cresting a huge mountain or working through a dark cave. It’s a sense he hopes to restore with his game.

Board is also hoping to bring fully fleshed-out characters to Lifeless Planet without relying on paragraphs of dialogue. “ICO and, more recently, LIMBO are games that I think have strong characters that did little or no talking,” says Board. “Now there will be some text logs and other documents in Lifeless Planet, but these will mostly supplement the story for players who want to dig deeper. I’m trying to say as much as I can in this game through visuals and the spectacular musical score being composed by Rich Douglas.”

Board originally hoped to release Lifeless Planet in 2012, but the game underwent a significant delay that pushed out of that release window. He attributes this to the nature of being a one-person development team. “If I were just the developer, I’d be done by now, but I’m also public relations, designer, artist, and writer,” Board explains. “I’ve learned so much over the last year and a half. It’s very rewarding but I’m also very glad to be nearing the finish. This game has been my whole life for almost two years now and I’m ready for a break — but at the same time, I’m not complaining because I’m paying the bills doing what I love, and that’s hard to find sometimes. In terms of lessons learned, I’d say the biggest is the benefit of setting goals and milestones and striving for them, even if I don’t hit them.”

Another reason for the delay involves the game’s Kickstarter success, as Board hoped to take that money and use it to create the best possible product. “My original vision for the game was more limited, but this is one of those stories that has just clicked with a lot of people. So I decided a year ago to make the most of the opportunity to tell this interesting story in the best way I know how.”

While working as the main driving force behind a game’s development is a grueling task, Board leaves some encouraging words for anyone looking to go into solo game development. “Honestly, now is the time,” he says. “Just be careful to spend weeks or months upfront deciding exactly what and how you are going to do what you want to do. Not just from a development standpoint, but marketing and publicity as well. Make sure your idea is original and fun. Don’t leave parts of the concept in your head — put it down in writing. You’ll be surprised how many elements that you thought were answered are not. Figuring out the details before you start is huge. But yeah, now is such a great time to make your idea happen. Kickstarter and similar sites make it possible to connect your game idea with other people who will want to support it. Chances are, if you like your idea, a bunch of other people will, too. And development tools like Unity and Blender make it possible for one or a few people to do amazing things.”

With Board’s years of work about to bear fruit, I took a moment to ask about the face of Lifeless Planet: the faceless astronaut. With early screenshots only revealing an unknown figure in an astronaut suit, I asked if players would ever see the man inside the suit. The answer has a lot to do with both narrative aesthetics and practical game design choices.

“You may get a brief glimpse of his face, but really I want the player to identify with the character as if they are the one in the space suit,” Board answered. “I also made a conscious decision early on to manage the scope of the game. Detailed, articulated character faces add a lot of development time. Since this is not a dialogue-heavy game, this would be mostly wasted energy. There’s a definite backstory to this individual, but at the same time, the suit creates a kind of barrier to fully understanding him. At the end of the day, astronauts are human beings, but they are mostly required to set aside their emotions in order to accomplish their mission.”

Board is aiming for a spring release for Lifeless Planet. Look for it to arrive on PC and Mac.

The result of this team-up is a truly fiendish iOS puzzle game that’s far from by-the-numbers.

Hundreds originally started off as a free Flash title that has evolved into an intuitive touch-screen experience. The idea is to inflate circles (usually valued at 0) until the combined total of all the circles reach 100. The catch is that none of the circles can intersect during the inflation process or the game ends. This proves deceptively difficult, as the laws of physics are fully in play. Circles bumping into one another will increase their speed and have them bouncing around, not unlike what you’d see on an air hockey table.

The variety of circle types and obstacles in Hundreds is staggering. On top of circles that need to be expanded, there are bumpers, razor circles that pop anything they touch, bubbles, ice circles that freeze anything they touch, and hockey pucks that can be moved anywhere on the field. By far, however, the most sinister of the obstacles is the red circle, which immediately ends the game as soon as it makes contact with anything on the playing field. Having to keep track of red circles is by far the most difficult task in a game full of hair-pulling, circular conundrums.

While playing the original Hundreds was a fun diversion, the iOS Hundreds proves to be a far superior product. The premise is much better suited to touch controls, especially on a multi-touch device like the iPad. Popping multiple bubbles or inflating simultaneous circles in a frantic race against time is simply something that can’t be done with a keyboard and mouse configuration. On top of that, the level design proves to be very clever, mixing up obstacles in just such an arrangement that puzzles come off incredibly difficult without feeling unfair.

It’s hard not to get pulled in by Hundreds, especially when certain puzzles are a hair away from getting solved. There will be many instances where your bubble gets burst just as you reach 99 and that frustration will pull you right back in. It’s a simple formula enhanced greatly by touch controls and is a fun game to drop a few bucks on.

Hundreds is available now on the iOS App Store as a universal app.

PAVILION FIRST TEASER 2012 from Visiontrick Media on Vimeo.

Beyond that, details about the game are scarce. To attempt to shed some more light about what Pavilion is, I talked to Visiontrick Media’s Henrik Flink.

“The premise very much came out of us experimenting with how you interact with and influence an AI driven character,” Flink said, describing the game. “After further exploration within this area and everything boiled down to a couple of subjects that we felt were strong enough to build an experience on. At this time, we were also intrigued by the desolate beauty and mystery of many 19th-century landscape paintings and soon found that a similar visual appearance would suit both the mechanics and the context we had settled on.”

The term “fourth person experience” sounds interesting, if a little unclear. I asked more about what exactly this term means. “The ‘fourth person’ idiom sprung out of the fact that we were looking for a way to describe the standpoint of the player towards not being in any direct control over the main character,” Flink answered. “The ‘no direct control’ idea we found is rarely used in gaming and generated some new interesting aspects of how one interacts and develops a relationship with an in-game character, especially when the player is not in any commanding position. AI and interactivity is something unique to games so we wanted to try to make the most out of it within the walls of Pavilion.”

Pavilion takes place in a surreal world unknown to the player and to the character. The game’s main driving forces will include investigation, observation, and exploration. Players will journey across mysterious areas that include mystical ruins, baroque gardens, and other dreamlike landscapes, where both the player and the main character will find purpose within those places. Flink explains that Pavilion’s world is chopped into individual areas that are logically connected to one another. “Having a continuous world where the player can be immersed and feel compelled to explore is something that we value a great deal and we are putting a lot of effort in getting it just right,” he said.

Pavilion began life as a small puzzle prototype that Flink and his partner, Rickard Westman, created a year ago. While it did not harbor the mechanical depth that they had hoped for, they found enough salvageable elements to start fresh. “It led us in a completely new direction,” Flink added. “After a lot of conceptual soul searching, we found the game evolving around the subjects of subliminal manipulation and indirect control. Not only in a game mechanical sense but also in a more conceptual and theoretical sense, it became important for us to find something that worked as well in the world of mechanics as in the world of context.”

Visiontrick points out that work on Pavilion is just beginning and that the media currently on the game’s website is meant to test graphics, level design, and other features that are yet to be implemented. Flink says that their ambition is to create a focused and coherent experience that fully represents their vision, meaning some of the current assets may undergo some change before the final release. However, he also notes that the game’s visual atmosphere will most likely remain the same.

Flink hopes to have Pavilion ready for a late 2013 release, but indicates that Visiontrick will be taking their time with this game. Look for it to arrive on desktop and mobile devices as soon as it’s ready.

Simon Strange, owner of Sunstone Games and a former member of the Godzilla trilogy’s development team, is now moving forward to creating a new generation of monster games with Kaiju Combat.

Kaiju Combat seeks to revive the spirit of the aforementioned Xbox/PS2-era Godzilla games. The game is made largely possible thanks to crowd funding, mainly Kickstarter, which has allowed Sunstone to license the Spigot engine from Pipeworks and continue building upon the foundation built by the previous Godzilla titles. With a devoted community behind them, Strange concluded that the team should involve the community in all aspects of development, including monster design.

Strange is looking to retain the atmosphere of two towering creatures epically grappling for supremacy in Kaiju Combat. “If you look at very large animal combat, they don’t punch or even claw their opponents — they crush them,” he explains. “A large animal flings itself at its prey to knock it down and knock the wind out of it. Human-scale fighters are all about quick strikes, parries, blocks, and counters. But there isn’t really any way to block or parry a monster tackling you. We’re adjusting our combat engine to support not only traditional strikes (which you can still block), but all these sort of Momentum-based attacks (“Charging”) that really define the “Giant” part of “Giant Monster Combat.” So our characters will all have four primary methods of combat — Melee, Grappling, Ranged Attacks, and Charging.”

Kaiju Combat will also retain other elements of the Godzilla titles, including the point-based victory method for three and four-player brawls. While each monster will have a health bar, Strange points out that victory isn’t as straightforward as depleting it to zero. “There are lots of last-minute comeback attempts in giant monster films and we wanted to capture some of that,” he added. “Smash Bros. is a great example of an alternate health system that accomplishes that same goal, though ours won’t be quite as granular as that. Once a monster reaches zero health, they become vulnerable to Knock Out attacks, which can potentially end the fight at any time. If they keep taking damage through other means, they will eventually go down, even without a Knock Out attack.”

The Sunstone community has been coming on strong with original monster designs, many of which will be available in Kaiju Combat. One example includes a giant eel called Moratitan, who psionically forms an exoskeleton of coral that allows him to travel across dry land. All of the monsters will be brought to life by Matt Frank, cover artist for IDW’s Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters comic book series.

As for Godzilla himself? He will eventually join the roster of playable characters, along with some of his licensed brethren. However, Kaiju Combat’s Kickstarter page states that the Godzilla video game license will not be available for at least another year. Fortunately, Strange and Sunstone are on very good terms with Toho, owners of the property. “Most of the companies just want to know that you have a decent reputation and that your money is good,” Strange explains. “They want their characters to be used in awesome and new ways, so once you’ve established a baseline of trust, you’ve done most of your job. Toho is an especially tricky case, because Godzilla so often skirts the line between serious & silly. That’s a hard row to hoe, so Toho really wants to keep a tight leash on that property.”

Until the Godzilla license clears up, players will be able to pick up a free version of the game featuring four monsters from the Kaiju Land franchise. They can also opt for a paid version that will contain an additional ten monsters, including Nemesis from the new Jeremy Robinson novel, Project: Nemesis.

Kaiju Combat is aiming for a September 2013 launch on PC with console releases coming shortly thereafter.