What's your game about?
Train answered the question about whether games could capture and express difficult emotions. It presents the player with a system -- an efficient system -- and then allows them to blindly work within its rules as given or find holes within to further their own aims.

Train also pushes at some other issues -- like why we need to have many multiple copies of each game (there is only one Train), why games must be "fun" in order to be effective, and how player complicity affects the way they feel. Train is ultimately about the Nazi SS machine, but there are multiple endings and even beginnings.

Why'd you make it?
I am making six games in a series to see if games can capture and express difficult emotions through difficult situations. I can't imagine a more difficult situation than the one Train captured.

How'd you make it?
Train was made by hand over the course of nine months. The first six months were research, staring at pictures, etc. The tracks were made with a bed of cork and then a layer of ballast combined with a custom mixture of glue, rubbing alcohol, and water. The trains and tokens were all handpicked and painted. At the request of a friend, I brought the game to Rabbi Belzer, here in Savannah, who blessed it. That's when it was finished.

What did you learn?
The greatest thing for me about Train was that it showed me the incredible expressive potential of game mechanics. I believe they are more powerful than paint. We can capture and express anything with them. Having made Train by myself, I also remembered how wonderful a solo project can be.

What's your pick to win the Jury Award?
Don't have one.

The Maw - Mike Wilford

What's your game about?
You play as a friendly alien named Frank that has been captured by intergalactic bounty hunters for being a threat to the universe. Maw is a fellow captive -- a small, cute, purple blob creature with a single googly eye, who happens to be the most dangerous organism in the universe.

You break free and lead Maw around on a leash as you try to find a way back home. You learn that Maw can eat anything smaller than himself and take on the abilities of some of the creatures he consumes. He can also grow to limitless size, which you must use to your advantage against the bounty hunters trying to stop you.

Why'd you make it?
The Maw is the first full game that Twisted Pixel made. Business-wise, we made it because we wanted to be a company that makes really great downloadable console games, and this was our chance to start with something unlike anything else on XBLA at the time. The Maw is a content-rich 3D action/adventure game, which is pretty ambitious for XBLA.

Creativity-wise, we made it because it's a very character-driven concept with lots of opportunities for humor and emotional moments between Frank and Maw. And we really like the idea of needing to use multiple characters together to solve puzzles and things.

How'd you make it?
From scratch. We started development by opening up Visual Studio and writing the very first lines of code. Over the course of nine months, with a team of eight awesome dudes, we built an Xbox 360 engine, a really nice level editor, and an ambitious 3D action/adventure game with lots of animation. It was a lot of work, but it seems to have paid off.

What did you learn?
We learned that there's no substitute for making the games that you want to make. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you're super passionate about something.

What's your pick to win the Jury Award?
Honestly, as a game developer, I don't get enough time to play games, and that goes for indie games too. I haven't had the time to play all of the finalists yet, so I'm a little unprepared to answer this question.

Eliss - Steph Thirion

What's your game about?
It's about stars and space phenomena. It's about new mechanics of interaction. It's about finger gymnastics. It's about space management.

Why'd you make it?
I made this game because I saw a great opportunity in the iPhone platform for new kinds of interaction (e.g. multitouch) as well as ease in self-publishing.

How'd you make it?
I locked myself in my room for five months.

What did you learn?
I learned that making a complete and well-rounded video game is one of the most insanely complex tasks.

What's your pick to win the Jury Award?
I can't say, as I haven't played a tenth of all those games. I'm looking forward to doing that during the festival. I hope the best wins.

Ruben & Lullaby - Erik Loyer

What's your game about?
Ruben & Lullaby is about a young couple having their first fight. The player tilts their iPhone or iPod touch back and forth to cut between different shots of the main characters, advancing the story. There's no dialogue in the game, just the facial expressions of the characters and a dynamic jazz score to fire the player's imagination as to what these two are fighting about and how it's going.

With touch controls, the player can shape the emotions of the characters -- shaking the device to make someone angry, or stroking the screen to calm someone down -- thereby affecting the direction and outcome of the argument. It's up to the player to decide whether to try and keep them together or break them up.

Why'd you make it?
I've been playing with various combinations of interactivity, music, and storytelling for a number of years through various web projects. More recently I've been interested in looking at the visual language of comics and how that can be applied to interactive storytelling.

The widespread adoption of gesture-driven interfaces in the last few years felt like the final piece of the puzzle sliding into place; the thing that, in combination with interactive music and the visual language of comics, could make a fresh kind of story-driven interactive entertainment a reality. The release of the iPhone SDK gave me an opportunity to take the first step in bringing this idea to life.

How'd you make it?
Before the iPhone SDK was released, I had been building prototypes of some music and storytelling ideas in Flash using the Wii remote. The SDK suddenly provided this direct route to the market, however, so I switched gears. Once I got into the iPhone developer program, it was relatively easy to take the concepts I had been playing with and adapt them for Apple's device.

The concept of gesture-controlled emotions came pretty quickly, and the idea of cutting back and forth between two characters seemed simple enough to realize, so I called Ezra Claytan Daniels, a comic artist I had already collaborated with on another project, and hired him to create the artwork for the piece while I did the development on evenings and weekends.

What did you learn?
Most of my past development experience was with scripting languages, and anything C-related had always been a barrier for me. A friend of mine had successfully made the transition a few years back, and that gave me some confidence to give it a shot. Even so, it was quite a challenge to try and learn enough of C, Objective-C, Cocoa, OpenGL ES, and the iPhone SDK to put the piece together. So, just on the level of technical knowledge, I learned a lot!

On the design side, it was definitely a lesson in "less is more," which applies even more for mobile devices than it does on the desktop, and which I found to be kind of a relief when compared to desktop development. As indies of all sorts know, a limited palette really helps focus your creativity.

What's your pick to win the Jury Award?
I'd put my money on Tale of Tales' The Path.

Dear Esther - Dr. Dan Pinchbeck

What's your game about?
Aside from the fact that it's probably the game least easy to make an elevator pitch about...it's a psychological ghost story set on a deserted island. This is the official copy:

A deserted island...a lost man...memories of a fatal crash...a book written by a dying explorer. Dear Esther is a ghost story told using first-person gaming technologies. Rather than traditional gameplay, the focus here is on exploration, uncovering the mystery of the island, of who you are and why you are here.

Fragments of story are randomly triggered by moving around the environments, making every telling unique. Features a stunning, specially commissioned soundtrack. Forget the normal rules of play; if nothing seems real here, it's because it may just be all a delusion. What is the significance of the aerial? What happened on the motorway? Is the island real or imagined? Who is Esther and why has she chosen to summon you here? The answers are out there, on the lost beach and the tunnels under the island. Or then again, they may just not be, after all....

Why'd you make it?
Dear Esther was made as part of a research project experimenting with story and gameplay in first-person games. We wanted to see what happened when you stripped gameplay back from a first-person game, leaving just story and environment as the only means of engaging the player. We also wanted to explore using a highly abstract, semi-random narrative in a game, and see what players made of that.

How'd you make it?
As a big lump of clay in the middle of a table and a series of increasingly disturbing sketches pinned up around an empty room in a business incubation space at the University of Portsmouth, UK. Later, as pages of post-it notes and bits of paper covered in the kind of illegible fumblings towards narrative that [you see] in movies about serial killers. Finally, as polygons, displacements, and custom audio triggers in the Half-Life 2 engine.

What did you learn?
Don't try and set a scene at the top of a mountain at nighttime using the Source engine.

There's a real market out there for games that are pure story.

Don't underestimate FPS gamers.

What's your pick to win the Jury Award?
Zeno Clash.