Leo Christopherson must have been a great math teacher, we'll probably never really know, but we will always be certain of the fact that he was an excellent TRS-80 programmer and game designer that wowed computer gamers back in the late 70s and early-to-mid 80s. He was also very close to the archetype of what we'd today describe as an indie developer, what with him being a one man team with unique and quirky ideas, who still fondly remembers "the successes I had with graphics and sound on the old TRS-80 as being some of the best moments of my life. I would hope programmers today can experience that too, but I'm not sure how things go in the large teams of experts these days where each person is involved with one small aspect of the final result".

Leo came up with such classic games as Dancing Demon, Android NIM and Voyage of Valkyrie that are still remembered, loved and played to this day. "You know, it's really humbling that I still get emails from folks that were just kids back when I was programming on the TRS-80's" he told Jim McGinley who interviewed him and provided the quotes for this article. "They all say how much they enjoyed the programs, and I'm really pleased at how many mention that their careers in the computer field were inspired by my little programs".

Shaw-Han Liem, Jonathan Mak and Jason Degroot "6955" at the E3 Expo

Queasy Games' Sound Shapes for PlayStation 3 and PS Vita is a sidescrolling platformer, where level design generates sound design. The game allows you to customize your own stages in its level editor, incorporating building blocks designed by guest artists like Beck and deadmau5, and share those results over the PlayStation Network.

Queasy's Jonthan Mak won three Independent Games Festival awards for his solo effort Everyday Shooter, a marker of its inventive unity of gameplay, graphics and sound. This time around, audio has been overseen by Shaw-Han Liem, the composer of the I Am Robot and Proud series of electronic music albums.

In reaching out to visual artists like indie dev team Pixeljam to craft sprites for the game, Toronto chip musician Jason DeGroot, aka "6955," has been tasked with coordinating creative collaborations over the course of development. In this interview we hear about the prototyping process that preceded the recent launch of Sound Shapes.

In interviews you have said that Everyday Shooter got its start after you decided to turn your attention away from a more elaborate project to try out something simpler in design. Sound Shapes, it's been mentioned, got its start five years ago in a basement. What objectives were guiding you at the beginning?

Jonathan Mak: This is kind of the exact opposite. It started off with Shaw-Han and I creating visualizers for live music shows. We started talking about doing a game, but the problem was that at that point I still had Everyday Shooter stuck in my head.

Shaw-Han Liem: We grew up like a block away from each other but never met until around six years ago. I had been getting into projections and processing, and since he has so much experience doing coded visuals, it made sense to talk.

In a rather novel pay-once, cross-platform experiment, Galcon developer Phil Hassey has offered a limited deal to give iOS purchasers of Dynamite Jack free Humble Store codes for PC.

The App Store's fierce restrictions on game codes limits this experiment such that consumers must pay for the iOS version first to get the Windows, Mac, and Linux versions free. Whereas Humble Store and Steam developers can get virtually unlimited codes for their games to distribute, Apple only gives 50 free codes per update.

To make this sale reciprocal for PC, Hassey would have had to buy the codes himself, so Apple could keep its 30% profit. Prepping for this promotion with 10,000 iOS codes would have cost him around $9,000 instead of $0.

Despite not being able to reciprocate this sale to PC owners, Hassey said he has received no complaints or backlash so far. "I reassure them that they can give their extra desktop code to a friend, so they still get benefit from this promotion."

Bring up Shinobi III, Strider, or a number of other classic action titles to veterans of the 16-bit console game era, and you're likely to see a spark in their eyes, a fond remembrance for the good old games that the industry once produced -- 2D titles that demanded precise attacks, prescient acrobatics, and the sort of time investment that few adults could spare.

"A lot of people look at those games with nostalgia, but they don't really identify the fact that those games never actually stopped being fun," says indie developer Kris Durrschmidt. "These games aren't outdated. The game mechanics aren't outdated. People just stopped [making them]."

Durrschmidt, along with programmer Taron Millet, recently formed a startup called Crazy Viking Studios to create games that look and play like those action titles they remember from the Super Nintendo and Genesis' glory days, the kind of experiences that big publishers have, for the most part, since left behind.

The two have a history producing action-heavy sidescrollers; before forming Crazy Viking, they worked on a number of handheld licensed titles with cult followings at Griptonite Games, such as The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night (GBA), Spider-Man: Web of Shadows (DS), and most recently Shinobi 3D (3DS).

When Glu Mobile took over Griptonite last year and transformed it into a smartphone/tablet-focused studio, Durrscmidt and Millet decided it was time to strike out and create something unburdened by someone else's license or the often times irrational demands of IP owners.

Their first project, Volgarr the Viking, promises "16-bit style action from the golden era of arcade games, reimagined for today." To the untrained eye, it looks just like an SNES or Genesis title -- it even comes with a throwback box (provided you pledge enough money to its Kickstarter campaign) -- except the game's releasing for Windows PC.

New-minted indie developer Ken Amarit is something of a jack of all trades, about to make his formal game dev debut on iOS with Voyager. Aiming to do the whole works on his own, he was drawn to emphasize perhaps the most unique of his many skills. It's his approach to game creation that holds interesting takeaways for all beginning indies, and those about to fly solo for the first time.

The most eye-catching feature of accelerometer-controlled flight game Voyager is its stop-motion animation, made out of felted wool. Not only did Amarit think the touchable look of the felted wool animation would be a good fit for iOS platforms, but it was also something he could bring to the competitive App Store landscape that few others could offer.

Although there are plenty of ninja games, quite few depict the ninja as the master of stealth and trickery he ought to be. And stealth games are precious rare in the platformer genre. But with its upcoming Mark of the Ninja, Klei Entertainment wanted to try a couple new things.

Nels Anderson is leading the game's design, and even tackled the early legs of the project all on his own. It's the first time Vancouver-based Klei has done multiple projects at once; work on Mark of the Ninja became possible once Shank 2 was underway. Anderson says his studio would rather encourage cool ideas when they're possible rather than wait for some unspecified "right time."

With Klei's well-received Shank games, "we had figured out all this stuff about creating a 2D game that has really good feel, tight responsive controls, and stylized, super-fluid 60-frames animation," he says. "So let's take those core fundamentals, and use them to do something completely different."

As a fan of stealth games, Anderson saw an opportunity to mix up the melee combat generally native to 2D platformers. "At a high level, part of the reason I like stealth games so much is... the flow of the game is all about the game pushing onto you. Some dudes show up, and you react," he explains.

But in stealth games the player is fundamentally undetected from the beginning: "It's the player that pokes and perturbs the world," Anderson says. "The flow of these games tends to be more about pull. You utilize your understanding of how the systems work, and you prod and disturb the game world in kind of an intersting way. That's why I like stealth games so much -- because it's not about reaction, it's about anticipation and planning."

Project Zomboid, the incredibly ambitious zombie survival RPG that pits gamers against loneliness, starvation, desperation, insanity and, yes, zombies, is about to get a brand new version, and Will Porter, Project Zomboid's writer and co-designer, is about to answer a few questions. So, uhm, read on!

So, Project Zomboid, a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested RPG by The Indie Stone is having indie and PC gamers all excited; then again, who are The Indie Stone?

The Indie Stone are Marina 'Mash' Siu-Chong, Andy 'Binky' Hodgetts, Chris 'Lemmy' Simpson and me Will Porter. I also have silly nicknames but don't like to refer to myself with one, as I find it a little bizarre. We're an Indie collective that's partly based in Newcastle, partly near to Brighton and partly close to Canada. Our game also has a bunch of lovely contributors from all over the world, who all share our adoration of the shambling dead.

And you've decided to tackle zombies in a most unique and, dare I say, spectacular way. So, why did you decide on creating a deep RPG-like offering? Seems like these days FPSs are all the rage...

Well, I guess the easiest answer is because at PZ's core the development team is only really four people - one coder, two arty types and a writer. We all share the same vision and we all make gameplay decisions, but asking Chris to code an FPS all on his own would be a bit of an issue. (Then again he did actually do that once, and it didn't end well for either the game or his sanity!)

Chris and Andy have a background in modding the Sims and Civilization, they're really interested in systems, moodles and evolving gameplay. I think it was quite a natural decision to go with a survival simulator like PZ.

Back when Sony's PlayStation Suite was first detailed, it quickly became clear that it had quite the resemblance to a certain other digital platform -- one that has its share of, ahem, problems.

Sony's initiative, now known as PlayStation Mobile, is an exciting prospect that will allow any developer to register, pay $99 a year for a publisher license, and then develop and release as many games as they desire via the PlayStation Store, as long as said titles keep to the relatively lax service guidelines.

It just so happens that Xbox Live Indie Games, Microsoft's equivalent service for the Xbox 360, also has the exact same yearly membership fee, and features very similar standards in terms of what content can be submitted and how the process of development and submission is tackled.

The open-endedness of Xbox Live Indie Games has proven to be quite the double-edged sword, especially when paired alongside the poor discoverability of games on the service. Allowing any developer to produce games for the service meant that XBLIG quickly filled up with sub-par Xbox Live avatar games, and games with names like Try Not To Fart.

Even now, nearly four years after its original launch, XBLIG's top lists are filled to the brim with avatar games and Minecraft clones, with all the original, innovative titles that deserve recognition pushed well below the top list threshold.

Presenting at the 2012 Game Developers Conference

Martin Stig Andersen's soundscape for Limbo received the Interactive Achievement Award for sound design from the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. Recently released for Mac and PC, Limbo Special Edition comes bundled with a boy sticker, seven original art cards, 3D glasses and the award-winning soundtrack.

We had the chance to meet with the sound designer, together with French-language news site Musica Ludi, to hear about the process behind Playdead studio's independently funded game titles.

The soundtrack to Limbo has appeared on iTunes and Bandcamp. What were your initial thoughts on the process of taking this very dynamic, atmospheric game score and adapting it for a standalone soundtrack album?

Martin Stig Andersen: What is most frightening to me about making an isolated soundtrack is having to consider that while composing. Because I did not compose music outside the game, in a way I did not like the idea of releasing a soundtrack. Ideally, when you take the game design, art and music away from each other, each is ruined.

Alex Paterson and Dom Beken of the hip-hop duo High Frequency Bandwidth were nominated for a BAFTA Award for their score to Q-Games' independently developed title PixelJunk Shooter.

The UK music group and Kyoto game studio have since collaborated on PixelJunk Shooter 2 and PixelJunk SideScroller for PlayStation Network. We had the chance to catch up with Dom Beken for a brief overview of the history behind the latest soundtrack release, SideTracks: The Soundtrack to Sidescroller, now out on iTunes and Amazon Mp3.

Sidetracks - Music from Sidescroller (Album Teezer) by Dom Beken

Q-Games appears to have integrated musicianship into the daily operation of the Kyoto office. Designers there have formed a band called the Electric Bends, and have uploaded an album to Bandcamp.

Dom Beken: We have a lively and amusing email string going on about production techniques. I only wish I could manage to knock out a few computer games over my lunch break.