One year ago, Super Meat Boy dev Edmund McMillen rocked the indie- game world with The Binding of Isaac, a highly controversial dungeon-crawling roguelike that captivated audiences with its grotesque, evocative imagery and design. In this month’s postmortem, McMillen tells us how The Binding of Isaac started life as a game jam project and how it went from an underdog to an international indie hit.

People power the game industry. In this year’s installment of the Power 50, Game Developer and Gamasutra editors team up to acknowledge the individuals in and around the game industry whose efforts in art, audio, design, business, evangelism, and programming have inspired us to step up our collective games.

Demiurge Studios’s cofounder takes us through a special “midmortem” that explains how work on XBLA 2D shooter Shoot Many Robots set up the studio to make a free-to-play multiplayer spinoff called Shoot Many Robots: Arena Kings. Find out what has gone right and wrong (so far) with the process of taking work on one game and turning into a completely new game altogether.

Loudness metering standards can open up new avenues for game audio designers to be creative (and efficient)—but only if they use the right standards. Audio specialist Shaun Farley explains why the game audio community needs to look outside loudness metering standards designed for broadcast media or risk losing their oomph.