Category: Interviews

Transport Fever 3 is the latest, ambitious entry in the long-running transport-tycoon series, building on the franchise’s core strengths while adding smarter cities, deeper logistics, revamped cargo systems, advanced traffic behavior, and richer visual atmosphere. This interview with Urban Games digs into the design choices behind those changes – when refinement became reinvention, which systems were fundamentally rethought, how citizen and cargo simulations tie into economy and player decision-making, how accessibility and performance were balanced, and how the team preserved sandbox freedom alongside a historically inspired campaign. Continue reading “Developer interview: Transport Fever 3”

Gareth Owens – a onetime film-and-TV writer who cut his teeth with studios from Aardman to Pinewood before founding Wise Monkey Entertainment – has spent the last few years turning a lifelong love of British whodunits and absurdist comedy into something delightfully strange: No Stone Unturned, a comedy‑noir detective RPG game that casts an amnesiac squirrel, Detective Cox, as its hard‑boiled protagonist and stitches together murder mysteries, bespoke mini‑games, and theatrical puppetry‑inflected performance into a single, mischievous package. The game wears its influences proudly – Columbo and Jonathan Creek meet surreal animal farce – but it’s also unmistakably Owens’: part escape‑room puzzle design, part cinematic storytelling, and all pointed, playful weirdness aimed at making players laugh while they peel back a much larger mystery beneath the village’s quaint surface. Continue reading “Developer interview: No Stone Unturned”

Patrick Ascolese, founder of Seattle‑based Dark Arts Software, turned a wedding‑floor epiphany and years of award‑winning game and XR experience into Trip the Light, a Meta Quest Early Access VR partner‑dance game that teaches salsa, swing, and tango through guided lessons and a patient, AI‑driven virtual partner (Vironica) modeled on a real collaborator; designed for accessibility on consumer Quest hardware without foot trackers, the title uses synthesized chest‑direction tracking, mixed‑reality passthrough, and community‑led development via Kickstarter and Early Access so players can both learn to dance and help shape the game – now, here’s our conversation with Ascolese. Continue reading “Developer interview: Trip the Light: Let’s Dance”

When Haymaker burst into Early Access on Meta Quest this past November, Console Studios’ debut VR brawler made a splash with its uncompromising, physics-first approach to melee combat – a system designed to make every fistfight feel visceral, unpredictable, and earned. Built by founder James Console and his Kansas City–based outfit, the title eschews canned animations in favor of active ragdoll physics and gesture-driven strikes, inviting players to punch, kick, and grapple their way through gritty encounters where environment and timing matter as much as technique. In this wide-ranging interview, Console digs into the inspirations behind Haymaker’s core mechanics, the challenges of crafting intuitive input mappings, how Early Access feedback is shaping combat and AI, and what recent additions like dodge-to-counter and expanded kicks say about the game’s evolving identity. Continue reading “Developer interview: Haymaker”