Interview with Independent Gaming Festival (IGF) 2009 Winners

In the midst of the hubbub that was Independent Games Festival, I was fortunate enough to yank a few developers away from their games and talk to them. No easy task, I assure you.

My first victim was "Mr. Phosphorous" of the development team Digital Eel. Their game Brainpipe had won the Excellence in Audio award this year, making it the second year in a row that Digital Eel had won the award. Here's what he had to say.

So, how did a game like Brainpipe come about?
Really, we don't develop games as much as "grow" them. Iikka (someone else on the team) was playing around with the physics engine: plunging down a tube, basically. We thought there was something to it, so we added obstacles and we visualized how the sound and music would work.

What was your goal with Brainpipe?
Our goal was to make it relaxing, confusing, and intense all at the same time. An idea that was incorporated into the game was to take the player back to a retro experience: no story, no frills- which is why the game only has one button, for example.

Obviously, Digital Eel is a creative bunch. How many ideas do you go through?
The way things usually work is that we'll have about 5 or 6 ideas that we'll toy with, and only one will emerge as an actual game. Brainpipe, like many of our other games, just happened. Chances are, our next game will probably be like that, too.

Any final thoughts or words of wisdom?
Just keep playing games and supporting indie games, and developers will keep making them.


Next up was the co-creator of Dyson: Rudolf Kremers. His and Alex May's game was nominated for the grand prize this year, but unfortunately did not win despite our suggestion (See our IGF roundup) that it should. He had quite a bit to say, and we even strayed into theoretical physics territory, weird as that sounds.

Tell me about the origins of Dyson.
It all started with a site that had a contest for indie gamers: the gist of it was that you had to produce a full game in one month with a given theme. So, Alex and I made a prototype of Dyson in one month and we got second place with it. There was enough good feedback that we decided to enter it into the IGF. It started simple: colored balls and lines, that was it, and got bigger and more polished as time went on. We got in for the grand prize at IGF, which was unexpected.

Is Dyson ready to be published yet?
No, it's still in development. We've signed up with Direct2Drive and Steam, and our "official" publish date is at the end of July or early August this year. But that's not even close to being final.

Does the name "Dyson" have anything to do with the vacuum cleaner?
No, it has nothing to do with the vacuum. It comes from the name Freeman Dyson, who was a theoretical physicist, with a lot of high concepts that actually lend themselves as game ideas fairly well. Two of his concepts that we found really interesting were the Dyson Tree, which is where machines are landed on asteroids and use the rock's resources to make it inhabitable, and the Astro Chicken, which is a space exploring robot that lands on planets and populates it. These theories, with some conflict and competition thrown in to make it a game, are sort of the basis of Dyson.

Obviously, Dyson is a unique game. What was your goal with Dyson?
We wanted to take a genre of game that usually is stressful and very inaccessible to most people and tried to do the exact opposite. Everything is meant to have an organic feel: that's why the visuals are all mellow pastels and the music is relaxing. We wanted to make it simple, but complex. It offers a different perspective on RTS games, and it's meant to produce a different reaction from people.



Eventually I got through the line at Daniel Tabar's (of Data Realms) booth to sit down briefly with him and talk about his game Cortex Command. It won two awards: Technical Excellence and the Audience Award, which explained the consistent crowd that wandered around the game's booth.

What's the story behind Cortex Command's creation?
It took about eight years to develop, and I started it mostly because I wanted to teach myself game development. I ended up making my own game engine from scratch, and everything was self taught: I just went and bought how-to books off Amazon.
I had worked with other teams like 2XL on some of their projects, but I wasn't totally into those, so I quit them for Cortex Command. I ultimately quit two jobs and school for this game, and it took eight years to finish (I wasn't working the whole time, that's just from the start to where I am now).

Everything was self-taught, but did you end up doing everything yourself?
No, I had help. I worked with a few other people who did the art and music for the game. We worked almost entirely online, and I haven't actually met them yet.

What are your future plans for Cortex Command?
It's not done yet, so I'm going to keep polishing it. I plan to flesh out the single-player mode with some more content, and work some more on the multiplayer mode as well. There won't be any network multiplayer, though. It's too detailed, with all of the physics and sprites and so on.


My last interviewees were Andy Nealen and Eddy Boxerman of Hemisphere games. Their game Osmos, a favorite of mine, was nominated for three awards, but didn't win any of them. Instead, it won the Direct2Drive award, the finalists of which were announced less than a week before the ceremony.

How did Osmos come to be?
Eddy: I put it together in a couple of weeks and sent a really basic demo to Andy. It was really rough, because it was pretty much nothing but the basic idea and something simple to represent it.
Andy: It wasn't flashy at all; it was just the skeleton of the game. But we spent a lot of time from there on just polishing how it looked and played. We spent a long time on the music, for example, because we believe that it's an important part of the game's experience. Eddy: We entered it into the IGF last year, but we didn't make it in, so we waited and made it better. The work paid off, and we got in and won something this year.

What did you want the player to get out of Osmos?
Andy: Our approach with Osmos was that we started with a basic hook and figured out a way to represent it.
Eddy: The basic mechanic in Osmos, as I see it, is actually the balanced, fundamental rule of the universe. That might be overblowing a little, but that's basically what I thought of. Andy: It makes sense: sustainability and the rules of existence, etcetera. Whenever we talked about the game, Eddy always started to speak in metaphors.

Where do you plan to go from here?
Andy: I'm working on a new project, and Eddy and I still are working together. We plan to take our feedback from IGF and apply it.
Eddy: Really, the best feedback you get isn't from your friends, or your friend's friends, but from complete strangers. That's what you get at GDC, and it's the best kind of experience for this kind of work.


The IGF was a heated battle this year, and well worth attending GDC solely for the indie scene. It was an awesome experience, and all of the developers (not just the ones we interviewed) showed tons of promise. With my faith renewed in independent videogames (as if I had ever lost it), I look forward to the future.

We look forward to seeing all these games released!