IGM Dream Team: Futurlab And Hermitgames

IGM Dream Team is a new feature series in which I pair up two great indie studios which I believe are compatible in terms of developmental ethos, style, and other factors. I will be discussing how they would work together, and how their hypothetical collaboratively-developed game would turn out. It’s basically an outlet for my nerdy gaming fantasies. I hope you enjoy it!

My very first IGM Dream Team is a marriage of two of my all-time favourite indie studios, and it’s the fantasy team-up that inspired this entire feature concept. I simply love everything that has come from both of these developers, and I see a definite affinity between the two. My selections for the first IGM Dream Team are Futurlab and hermitgames. Below is a quick burst of information on both studios for the unfamiliar.

• • Name: Futurlab
  • Releases: Coconut Dodge, Velocity, Fuel Tiracas, Beats Slider, Surge, Velocity Ultra, Coconut Dodge: ReVitalised
  • Platforms: PSP, PS3, PS Vita, iOS
  • Speciality: Bite-sized yet compulsively playable arcade experiences, adddictiveness, classic twitchy and reaction-based gaming.

• • Name: hermitgames
  • Releases: fren-ze, Leave Home, Qrth-Phyl
  • Platforms: PC, Xbox Live Indie Games
  • Speciality: Creating new spins on classic genres, a brilliantly arresting and quintessentially ‘gamey’ use of audio and visual design, finely-tuned score-chasing gameplay.

So now you know a little about the studios in question, if you didn’t already. Now you’re probably just wondering why I think Futurlab and hermitgames are so well-suited, and why I believe that a collaboration would yield such fantastic results. Well, as I touched upon above, both of them tend to focus on old-school score-based arcade experiences — particularly the shoot-em-up genre, which both developers have shown a proficiency for. Futurlab‘s Velocity and hermitgames’ Leave Home are, for my money, two of the best modern “shmups” available, thanks to solid underlying mechanics and — crucially — a healthy dose of new ideas. The teleportation mechanic of Velocity and the adaptive difficulty of Leave Home are both worthwhile and transformative additions to an otherwise aging genre. Imagine a shmup that combined the imagination of both of them! It makes me excited just thinking about it.

Matt James, the lone developer working under the hermitgames moniker, has also tweeted his appreciation for Futurlab’s Velocity in the past, which shows they’re on the same wavelength. An appreciation of one another’s work would be crucial for a successful collaboration, so this tweet makes me feel even more sure that this dream team-up would be a successful one.

Besides a mutual background of developing innovative shoot-’em-ups, there is a more intangible and difficult-to-define connection between the two.  Both studios appear to share a development ethos; a tribute to the classics without pandering or being in thrall to the past, a focus on gaming purity and mechanics above all else. As much as I enjoy the interactive storytelling and progressive ‘games as art’ movements that are kicking off in the indie community, I will always be most interested in games that hook me on a purely gaming level, and I appreciate that for developers like Futurlab and hermitgames that is still the primary objective.

That’s why I feel that a joint project between Futurlab and hermitgames would be a dream team. Agree with me? Disagree? Have your own suggestions for ideal development team-ups? Let us know in the comments, take to the IGM forums where I’ve started a thread on the topic, or tweet me @PleasantPig! We’d love to hear your feedback on this topic.

You can learn more about Futurlab and hermitgames on their official websites, or via their Twitter accounts: @Futurlab and @hermitgames.