Madness is a seven-day project that explores the theme of insanity in a roguelike very well, where players take on the role of an adventurer who has to descend ten dungeon floors and defeat the evil Dungeon Master who resides at the lowest level. If you enjoy light roguelikes, then this is definitely one game that you should download just for the concept alone.

Everything after this point is spoiler territory, and it is recommended that you try the game out yourself instead of having me reveal all of the surprises that you might encounter during your adventures here. (Windows/Linux, 1.58MB)

In Madness you have a sanity meter that counts down after every couple of moves, but you can replenish it by drinking a potion of sanity if you have one in your possession. Weapons and armor can be equipped, and you will need to light torches and lamps regularly to illuminate your surroundings.

When your sanity is low, you will begin to imagine things. Instead of fighting the usual array of rats, goblins and dragons, players may have to do battle with odd creatures like butterflies, flying spaghetti monsters and unicorns (both pink and robotic varieties). Occasionally you may even come across one of your brethen, but the state of their mind is more likely to cause concern rather than bring a sense of comfort.

I don't know what happens when the sanity counter reaches zero, but you do get some really trippy effects when your adventurer is very close to losing his mind.

I'm going to post this on the front page because a few people might not have noticed this trailer when the Gamma IV write-up went live just a couple of days ago. According to Mike:

"4Fourths is a 4-player team game, and is probably my favourite Gamma IV winner. Created by Mikengreg, two spaceships adorn the left and right edge of the screen, with a player controlling each (tapping the button boosts the ship up the screen, while releasing it lets the ship fall slowly down). The other two players control the guns, which are both facing into the centre of the level.

Huge boss ships are then sent one by one down the centre of the screen, and the 4 players work together to take each out. Being on opposite sides of the action, it is possible to shoot your team-mates and kill them, so careful blasting is necessary. Of course, you'll probably want to shoot your team-mates anyway since, let's face it, killing each other is fun. Mikengreg are looking for someone to help them take the idea to the next stage, so if you're a publisher-type person reading this - make this happen please."

Think roguelike meet Small Worlds, and you'd have a pretty good idea of what Team Lantickall's A Most Peculiar Adventure is all about. Viewed from an overhead perspective, your quest is to find a complete set of suits, each hidden somewhere in four separate secret caverns on the area map.

Similar to controlling a tank, you use the left or right cursor key to change the character's facing position, then press the up arrow key to move forward one tile at a time. The game will work on either Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, provided that Java is already installed on your machine.

Let's take a look at the latest interviews with indie game developers on the web. Highlights include: Andy Schatz lays out the platform plans for Monaco, a chat log with Captain Farbs, and a near-complete set of interviews with all of this year's IGF finalists.

Kotaku: Monaco Award-Winner Celebrates
"In this video interview with Stephen Totilo, Andy Schatz confirms that Monaco will be arriving on the PC and at least one console system when it's done."

Dejobaan Games: Possible Untruths about Farbs
"Farbs is one of the most celebrated game developers of the '10s, in no small part because of Captain Forever and Captain Successor. Dejobaan interrogates him in the oddest interview you'll read all week."

Rock, Paper, Shotgun: The (Mostly) Complete IGF Factor 2010
"We've interviewed all those who have been nominated for the short list. When you want to know about who these winners are... this is where to look."

A Hardy Developer's Journal: The Interview with Dave Gilbert
"Dave's Blackwell series of adventure games can be considered classics of the genre, already claiming a strong group of followers and subsequently making his company, Wadjet Eye Games, an overnight success. It was a pleasure to be able to speak to the man behind these games."

GameDev.net: Interview with Loren Schmidt
"I'm ready to try and make a living by making games. My second project is a tiny game called 'Tin Can Knight,' which should be out soon."

GameDev.net: Interview with Daniel Benmergui
"What's next for me? In the immediate future, Today I Die Again, the iPhone version of Today I Die. I am very curious to see what the reaction to this version is."

DIYgamer: The Future of Gaming - Spectre
"Spectre is a game where each time you play, you'll end up with a different experience. The game was created by a group of students from USC Interactive Media calling themselves Vaguely Spectacular."

DIYgamer: The Future of Gaming - Puzzle Bloom
"The game Puzzle Bloom hit PAX last September as one of their notable choices, and it's gone on to hit the student showcase at this year's IGF."

TheGamersHub: Pieces Interactive Interview
"We sat down with Calle Kyhlberg and Mårten Brüggemann, co-founders of Pieces Interactive (Fret Nice), to talk about their past, present and what the future might hold for these amazing developers."

Nicemetal is a tower defense game with an interesting gimmick, originally created by babarageo for distribution at Comiket 76. There are a number of unmanned defensive structures in each map, and you have to send out soldiers to operate them for a short amount of time before they'd return back to base.

Enemy robots will attempt to break through your defense, so it is just a question of managing your limited resources and destroying your adversaries before they reach the front gates. Your troops can only move in a straight line, and an enemy robot will have no hesitation when it comes to crushing them with their feet if the two ever meet.

You'll have to skip two cutscenes first before access to stage one is given at the main menu. There are six levels to play in total.

Nyahax is a loose remake of Galaga that features thirty stages to play, boss fights and even the occasional power-up items to collect for ship upgrades. Players are given a total of three minutes to beat the entire game, but you can earn some extra time during the bonus rounds that comes after every boss fight.

Don't forget to turn on the autofire option when starting your mission if you want to avoid getting blisters on your fingers. (source: babara)

Stickvania is a browser-based remake of Konami's Castlevania with stickmen graphics used for every art asset in the game. Purists will cry foul when they discover that our vampire-slayer can stop moving in mid-air while performing a jump, but most of the level layouts, enemy designs and boss battles will feel very familiar as they've been replicated here with some degree of faithfulness.

You'll need a Java-enabled internet browser to play this game. There are reports that the full screen mode can cause the application to crash when switching back, so you might want to avoid using that feature just to be on the safe side.

The PC version of hermitgames' abstract shooter is now available to download. In Leave Home, the difficulty of the game increases whenever you do well in it and scales back accordingly when you begin having problems keeping the ship in one piece.

A demo that features the first level from the full game can be acquired from the official page. The full version costs US $5, and the first twenty customers who purchases the PC version will get a free copy of Fren-ze as well.

Here's a gameplay video of the first area in Limbo, captured from the IGF showfloor at GDC. Gamespot has a new article about the award-winning platformer up on their site as well. More recorded footage of GDC attendees playing IGF games (and interviews) in the extended as I find them, but there's quite a few of those already up on GameVideos in the 'Recently Added Videos' section.

Monaco gameplay video

Edmund McMillen interview

Jamie Cheng interview, Shank trailer

Tiny and Big tells the story of a thief who had stolen our hero's most valued possession - a pair of underpants. The game basically is about him trying to chase after Mr. Big who had escaped to the top of a tall mountain. Armed with a raygun and a grappling hook, you must cut pillars and solid rock to build yourself platforms to stand or jump on.

The beta build might not run smoothly on older machines, but if you can get working then there is certainly some fun to be had from slicing and dicing stones like a hot knife cutting through butter. Download it here. (Mac/Win/Linux, 122MB)

The forty-second trailer released late last year showed little of Capybara's upcoming iPhone release Sword & Sworcery, but now we have two new clips that demonstrate gameplay elements from the IGF Mobile Achievement in Art award winner. The gorgeous pixel art is supplied by Craig "Superbrothers" Adam, while the music is composed by singer-songwriter Jim Guthrie.

A video showcasing the Punch Out-style combat in the game can be found in the extended. (source: GameSetWatch)

The six Gamma IV finalists are on the GDC expo floor for the next couple of days, and I've been trying these one-button beauties out to see what makes them so special.

Silent Skies by Spyeart aka Michael Todd uses a simple control mechanic. Flying a plane over a strange world, holding the button causes the vessel to fly in a anti-clockwise arc, while releasing the button turns clockwise. A combination of taps and good timing can send the plane roughly in a straight line.

There's a few levels on show here, each with its own special theme - e.g. one sees you collecting stars, while another involves a bombing run. There's also a final boss level. The mechanic works smoothly and makes for an enjoyable, if a little tame, experience.

Honeyslug's Poto & Cabenga is a really interesting concept that sounds like it shouldn't work, yet is pulled off wonderfully. When an alien rider is split up from his trusty steed, both must jump their way past a horde of enemies. Of course, both must also be controlled using one single button.

So it works like this - when the button is held down, one runs while the other walks, while the opposite happens when the button is not pressed. Also, when the button is initially hit, the guy jumps, then when the button is released, the horse jumps. Sounds incredibly confusing (and believe me, when I watched someone play it, I wondered how they were even managing it), but the enemies spawn in such a way that a pattern emerges which isn't too difficult to keep to. Very clever stuff.

4Fourths is a 4-player team game, and is probably my favourite Gamma IV winner. Created by Mikengreg, two spaceships adorn the left and right edge of the screen, with a player controlling each (tapping the button boosts the ship up the screen, while releasing it lets the ship fall slowly down). The other two players control the guns, which are both facing into the centre of the level.

Huge boss ships are then sent one by one down the centre of the screen, and the 4 players work together to take each out. Being on opposite sides of the action, it is possible to shoot your team-mates and kill them, so careful blasting is necessary. Of course, you'll probably want to shoot your team-mates anyway since, let's face it, killing each other is fun. Mikengreg are looking for someone to help them take the idea to the next stage, so if you're a publisher-type person reading this - make this happen please.

B.U.T.T.O.N (Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now) is another multiplayer one-button experience, although it seems a rather strange choice for a winner. Tasks pop up on the screen, such as 'Think of your favourite colour' and 'Take 5 steps back', and each player must follow the rules correctly to win.

Each game inevitably ends with all 4 players rushing at the screen and bashing their (or other players') buttons to succeed. It is good fun (I can imagine a small helping of alcohol would make it a party favourite), yet it's not exactly what I would class as an 'accessible' game.

cactus' GAMMA IV - THE GAME is trippy yet simple. Lines explode out from the centre of the screen, and each tap of the button causes the lines to change direction by 90degrees clockwise. The task is to smash into each of the squares around the screen and not bump into walls and the like.

It's mesmerizing stuff, although once you realise that it's possible to simply watch one corner of the screen it does pretty much become an extravagant game of Snake.

Finally, Steph Thirion's Faraway features perhaps the most innovative one-button mechanic of the six winners. Players control a shooting star which is flying through space. Holding down the button causes the comet to use the nearest star as a centre of gravity, allowing it to orbit around, changing its direction and velocity.

The key is to find special areas in space when constellations can be produced. Once such an area is entered, the key is to loop around stars, connecting them up and creating as complex a constellation as possible. Better connections give more score and add time to your clock - running out of time ends the game. It's a really gorgeous idea, although I was admittedly terrible at it.

So, these were the 6 winners chosen from over 150 submissions. If you're down at GDC in San Francisco, they'll all be available to play on the expo floor until Saturday evening. Well worth checking out.

Pocketwatch Games' stylish co-op caper, Monaco, was the big winner at the Twelfth Annual Independent Games Festival Awards, which was hosted by the Game Developers Conference 2010 at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

Monaco received the top award at the ceremony, earning the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game, as well as the award for Excellence in Design.

Other IGF award recipients for 2010, as judged by over 170 industry veterans, independent developers and indie-friendly journalists, also include PlayDead's starkly beautiful silhouetted platformer, Limbo, which won the awards for Excellence in Visual Art and Technical Excellence. Closure Team's puzzle platformer, Closure, earned the award for Excellence in Audio.

Noted independent developer Cactus (pictured) received the inaugural Nuovo Award for his abstract visual puzzle game, Tuning. The Nuovo Award honors "abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games."

The Nuovo Award was judged by a separate, smaller juried panel of notable game and art world figures, including previous IGF Innovation/Nuovo Award winner Jason Rohrer (Passage), Area/Code's Frank Lantz, N+ co-creator Mare Sheppard, EA division head and art-game creator Rod Humble, and more.

The IGF was established in 1998 by UBM TechWeb Game Network to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize the best independent game developers, in the same way that the Sundance Film Festival honors the independent film community. The IGF offer finalists both global exposure and over $50,000 in cash prizes to each year's winners.

Previous breakout IGF award-winners include titles such as Braid, Audiosurf, Castle Crashers, and World of Goo, and this year's awards saw 301 Main Competition entries from all over the world, coupled with the record-breaking number of IGF Student Showcase entries and IGF Mobile entries, for a total of nearly 650 entries. S2 Games' Heroes Of Newerth won the Audience Award, after receiving the largest share of thousands of public votes cast at IGF.com in recent weeks.

To ensure the highest-quality judging for the IGF, more than 170 leading indie and mainstream game industry figures -- from 2D Boy's Ron Carmel through Spore's Soren Johnson to ThatGameCompany's Kellee Santiago and beyond -- were recruited to choose finalists via a carefully constructed empirical process.

Finally, the award for the Best Student Game went to Ragtime Games' shifting-tile puzzle platformer Continuity, IGF Mobile Best Game was awarded to Tiger Style's Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor, and download partner Direct2Drive's $10,000 D2D Vision Award was won by Press Play's Max & The Magic Marker.

"This year sees an impressive array of visually arresting, emotionally challenging and fun games," said Simon Carless, IGF chairman. "And after extensive, in-depth playthroughs from a panel of influential games industry figures, the cream of the crop were chosen to receive honors at the IGF. We're extremely proud of the record number of amazing entries this year, and very grateful for the independent teams who put their hearts and souls into creating captivating, addictive and original gameplay experiences."

The IGF awarded the following games in each category of the main competition — each received a cash prize of $2,500 as well as sponsor-related prizes, apart from the Grand Prize of $20,000 and D2D Vision's $10,000 award.

Seumas McNally Grand Prize:
Monaco, by Pocketwatch Games

IGF Nuovo Award:
Tuning, by Cactus

Excellence in Visual Art:
Limbo, by PlayDead

Excellence in Audio:
Closure, by Closure Team

Technical Excellence:
Limbo, by PlayDead

Excellence in Design:
Monaco, by Pocketwatch Games

Student Showcase Award:
Continuity, by Ragtime Games

IGF Mobile Best Game:
Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor, by Tiger Style

Audience Award:
Heroes Of Newerth, by S2 Games

D2D Vision Award:
Max & The Magic Marker, by Press Play

For more information about the IGF, the finalists and the winners, please visit the official Independent Games Festival website.

Jump, Copy, Paste is a 2D platformer in which you overcome obstacles by copy and pasting parts of a level to build new platforms or create a passage through a wall. Parts which are greyed out cannot be affected by your copy and paste ability, so players need to work around those areas as they collect all yellow pieces to unlock the exit door.

There are seventeen levels to play through, and the game does get trickier with the introduction of bad guys, laser beams, switches, portals and even sawblades in the latter stages. (Windows, 2.20MB)

Here's our link round-ups for articles about the second day of Indie Games Summit talks, happening at the Game Developers Conference in San Franscisco this entire week:

Gamasutra: Exploratory Development
"Game development is one of the highest-pressure, most anxiety-inducing careers there is. An exploratory development process can be a solution, but only if it's managed with confidence and honesty, say ThatGameCompany's Kellee Santiago and Robin Hunicke."

Gamasutra: Ninjabee's Top 10 Development Lessons
"Ninjabee's art director Brent Fox shared a top ten list of development lessons learned from releasing games on Xbox Live Arcade and other platforms, offering useful advice for other indie developers during his lecture at GDC's Independent Games Summit in San Francisco."

Gamasutra: A Brief Postmortem Of Today I Die
"In a short talk during the Indie Games Summit at GDC in San Francisco, Daniel Benmergui (I Wish I Were The Moon) discussed the process of making the game that put him on the map, and is an IGF Nuovo finalist this year, Today I Die."

Gamasutra: Refenes' and Saltsman's Baffling $350 App Store Success
"I absolutely hate the iPhone App Store,' declared indie developer Tommy Refenes during his segment of the Indie Game Makers Rant at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week."

GameSpot: Indie developers spew rapid-fire rants
"The Indie Gamemaker Rant session was an orderly procession of five-minute spiels from a dozen people with an interest in the independent development community."

Edge Online: Semi Secret Talk Canabalt, Flixel
"Semi Secret Software's Eric Johnson gave a candid post-mortem of their hit game at GDC's iPhone Game Summit, closing out by revealing that Flixel, the flash game API used to create Canabalt, is being ported to iPhone for native development, including an Actionscript to Objective-C translator to accelerate Flash to iPhone ports."

Boing Boing: How The Indie Fund Could Change Game Dev Destiny
"Opening the 2010 Independent Games Summit, 2D Boy co-founder Ron Carmel took to the stage to explain why the fund was needed, with Braid artist David Hellman illustrating the strange over-complex steamwork behemoth of traditional business models that no longer serve the indies best."

In Redder you play as an astronaut forced to make an emergency landing on an alien planet after finding out that she has run out of crystals to power her ship. This 2D platformer features a world map, regular checkpoint locations, and an unlimited number of retries to assist players who are unaccustomed to difficult challenges.

The game takes about an hour to play through, and thankfully there are no additional fluffs like Time Attack or One Try modes included just to bulk up the achievements in Anna's latest browser-based effort.

Here's our link round-ups for articles about the first day of Indie Games Summit talks, happening at the Game Developers Conference in San Franscisco this entire week:

Gamasutra: Wolfire's Guide To Indie PR
"Wolfire, developer of Overgrowth, managed to create a lot of buzz for its game before it was even released. John Graham, one of four people on the team, says that it doesn't matter. You can and should create buzz as an indie even if your game isn't finished."

Gamasutra: Hello Games' MacGyver Mentality
"Part of being an indie game studio means focusing on the benefits of being small, rather than dwelling on the drawbacks of not being big – to think like a guerrilla. Being an indie also means being resourceful, especially with a small but talented team of just four people."

Gamasutra: Nourishing Your Indie Community
"One benefit of being an indie developer is that there is a community out there made up of people who want to see the scene flourish. But organizing that community can be a challenge. At GDC's Indie Game Summit on Tuesday, Jeff Lindsay offered ten ways to nurture your local indie game community."

1UP: Abusing Your Players For Fun
"It's probably a good sign when a presentation opens by informing attendees that it may kill them if they're prone to seizures. Much like his games, Jonatan Söderström's GDC talk was filled with flashing lights, garish colors, clips from David Lynch movies, and the feeling that somebody is having a joke at our expense."

Destructoid: Abusing Your Players Just for Fun
"Why would you want to be mean to your players? According to Söderström, most games are really easy, and worrying about what your player may be feeling and if they feel comfortable can compromise your vision as a designer."

GameSpot: Burnout vets talk guerrilla tactics for indie studios
"Sean Murray, managing director of independent startup Hello Games, rattled off survival statistics of independent studios, saying that of the hundreds of new indie shops, one in 10 survive one year and only half go on to release a game."

GameSpot: World of Goo dev lays out indie headaches
"World of Goo developer and 2D Boy cofounder Ron Carmel kicked off the Independent Games Summit program with a half-hour talk on the relationship between indie creators and publishers called 'Fixing a System That Never Worked.'"

Destructoid: Indies and Publishers - a System that Never Worked
"Carmel's talk elaborated on the details of the recently-announced Indie Fund, as well as the publishing environment than spawned it."

Edge Online: 2D Boy's Carmel Details Indie Fund
"2D Boy's Ron Carmel argued that the developer/publisher relationship was a 'system that never worked', and offered Indie Fund as a potential solution."

Joystiq: 2D Boy's Ron Carmel explains Indie Fund
"According to Carmel, publishers offer too much money to indie developers and take too much in return, relegating developers to the role of 'tenant farmers,' forced into a constant shift between seeking funding and development 'until something goes wrong and you can't find funding and you go out of business.'"

Animation World Network: Scrap Metal - Pushing the Envelope with a Team of Two
"When Kees Rijnen and Nick Waanders set off to make Scrap Metal, they only had two goals: the first to self-fund their own IP, and secondly, to stay small - the latter being considered a fundamental dynamic of their development."

The A.V. Club: People Who Didn't Have Very Much Skills
"Indie developers are pushing the amorphous medium of games ahead in ways that their corporate cousins cannot. That difference is exemplified by Jonatan Söderström, the prolific, idiosyncratic Swedish developer better known as 'cactus.'"

The A.V. Club: Which actions earn points?
"Söderström's tone implied that developers, like gamers, are sick of games being 'too easy,' but concluding that deviating from the norm draws in more gamers is a bit like declaring the sky is blue: painfully obvious."

2D Boy's Ron Carmel calls relationships between indies and publishers "a system that never worked". At the Independent Gaming Summit at the 2010 Game Developers Conference, he explained why -- and further detailed the Indie Fund, a new alternative for independent games funding.

When software development began to be conisdered as an engineering field, design came before building -- the "waterfall approach", as Carmel says, involving big design documents that everyone scrutinizes before implementing. But in the 1990s, people realized that system is less than ideal, and agile practices emerged that emphasized iterative over upfront design.

This is not only easier but more cost-effective in both the short and long-term, Carmel points out. "I think we're facing the same kind of situation in the game industry today in comparing retail games to digitally-distributed games," he says.

What are the problems caused by this mismatch? For one, publishers give too much money; for digital games the budgets are much smaller (for example, 2D Boy's World of Goo had a budget of only $120,000.) Large budgets on smaller games are less efficient -- publishers not only invest too much, but they take too much in return, and the result is developer as "tenant farmer."

How did this paradigm come to be? Ten or fifteen years ago, publishing deals were attractive, desirable goals in an era when retail was the only path to commercial success. When a publisher commits to a game, they not only commit to developing it, they're committed to all of the peripheral costs associated with retail, from packaging to distribution and marketing.

"All of this means it's a huge up-front risk," says Carmel. With that in mind, "it makes sense that the publishers keep all the profits." But with today's new breed of digital game, these costs are no longer necessary. Small teams, far fewer upfront costs and a much lower break-even point should theoretically provide the same upside as much higher-risk investments.

When releasing World of Goo via Games for Windows Live, 2DBoy began negotiating a contact whereby changes had to be approved by an executive and reviewed by a lawyer. From there, a producer supervised the production of the game until launch, and then there was extensive QA -- between the legal and the tech side, "that's a really big piece of machinery for one small developer to deal with," Carmel says.

Working with Steam was "far more efficient," Carmel says. It took one day of legal work: the contract process was conducted over email, signed and returned the same day, and then it took another four days to do the tech integration for Achievements and high scores. That same legal and tech process took four months with Games for Windows Live.

It's not necessarily a fair comparison, Carmel caveats, because Games For Windows Live is still very new, while Steam has established its process after being around for quite a few years. Nonetheless, the point still stands that going directly to digital offers a far easier infrastructure for indies.

Quintessentially, then the only things indies truly need is funding -- which still means going directly to publishers. But Carmel believes there's a solution: "How do we do for funding what Valve did for digital distribution? The answer, we hope, is Indie Fund," says Carmel.

The recently-announced "angel-style" Indie Fund is a group of independent devs who gathered to help other developers become and remain financially independent. There are seven backers involved: 2DBoy's Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler, Braid's Jonathan Blow, ThatGameCompany's Kellee Santiago, Capy's Nathan Vella, Flashbang's Matthew Wegner, and AppAbove's Aaron Isaksen.

Firstly, they aim to create a transparent distribution process. Stories of indies being "dicked around" by publishers results from no transparency on the process, says Carmel. "With the process that we're planning, it's going to be a lot shorter than the regular approval cycle for publishers," he says.

Second, publicly-available deal terms are important so that developers can comparison-shop, he says. They aren't revealing terms yet until they're sure the model works, but transparency will be a must. Third, they'll offer developers a single point of contact. A personal relationship helps avoid conflict of interest and simplifies the process.

A fourth focus is flexible development. "Anybody who's been in the game industry for more than a year or two realizes that when you start working on a game, you don't necessarily know how it's going to end up being," he says. The process requires experimentation and iteration, so the old methodology of coming up with big design documents ahead of time, with milestones attached that risk employee pay, ends up causing developers stress and ultimately risks game quality.

By this model, the developer submits periodic builds to the fund along with a change list, so the game is evaluated based on where it was last time it was evaluated, "not on where we think it should be," says Carmel. This approach "respects the game design process as it should happen," he adds.

Next, they seek no IP ownership. "We want for the developer to own the IP and for the developer to be master of their own destiny," Carmel says. This means no IP control either -- "We don't want to tell you how to make your game," he states. "If we provide funding for a game, then that's a vote of confidence in the team that they have a vision and that they can execute it," he says. "If I do know better than you what's right for your game, then we probably shouldn't be funding your game."

When asked how large the funding pool is, Carmel said that amount "doesn't matter. The bottleneck is how many games can we find that we think can make good use of the investment. If we can find 20 games a year that can make money, then we can raise money for 20 games a year."

Granted that these screenshots are still a work in progress and may look different at a later date, but the new images posted up on Spelunky World today does show what kind of art direction that Derek is going for in the upcoming XBLA version of Spelunky.

The game is still scheduled for a release on the Xbox Live Arcade service sometime in 2010. Derek will also be participating in an hour-long IGS panel on the subject of art this year together with Edmund McMillen (Super Meat Boy), David Hellman (Braid) and Ben Ruiz (Aztez), so if you're attending GDC don't miss the session which happens on Wednesday, March 10th.

2D Boy co-founder Kyle Gabler (World Of Goo) and Experimental Gameplay Project cohort Kyle Gray (Henry Hatsworth) have founded the "authentic indie labor"-powered developer Tomorrow Corporation.

The duo have teamed up with fellow Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center graduate and World Of Goo dev Allan Blomquist, with all three developers also co-founders of the influential rapid prototyping-centric Experimental Gameplay Project.

An EGP announcement of the studio notes that the trio "have been silently toiling away on an actual real game for months now, and while we’re not yet ready to announce it, expect more information to flow from our brand new studio’s brand new website."

The official site's art style reflects the visual persona of World Of Goo co-creator Gabler, who also continues to operate 2D Boy with Indie Fund co-founder Ron Carmel.

As referenced above, he is joined by former Electronic Arts staffer Kyle Gray -- creator of the critically acclaimed Nintendo DS title Henry Hatsworth In The Puzzling Adventure before departing EA Tiburon.

"The secret to a truly great indie game is that special human touch," said a Tomorrow Corporation spokeswoman alongside the announcement, "which our producers have scheduled for insertion shortly before the product ships."