There are currently 3 people on our team: I am the lead designer and programmer, Sang Han is our talented artist, and Mattias H?ggstr?m Gerdt is our creative musician.

Kaleidoscope is an adventure platformer set in a world shrouded by darkness. You must help Tint traverse through the surreal environments collecting color pigments to restore life and color to the world.

I wanted to make a game that was lighthearted and didn't rely on violence to drive a satisfying experience. To capture this lighthearted feel I referenced what kids did for fun. Instantly a coloring book popped into my head and I loved the idea of a world that evolved through coloring. After a lot of pondering about how to transfer that elegantly into a video game, Kaleidoscope was born.

I would classify Morsel as an independent development team. We take it more seriously than just a hobby, however we are just starting out so it's not a full time endeavour yet.

I am the only programmer on the team and I have been programming in C# for about 5 months. I have been familiar with other types of computer scripting languages like HTML, CSS, and Javascript for several years however C# is the first real programming language I've learned. When I was starting out I got a lot of help from online resources and of course the XNA community.

I'm ecstatic that Kaleidoscope was chosen as one of the top games for Dream Build Play 2009. It's such an uplifting feeling to know that people really appreciate what you've created.

We feel that it represents the opportunity to shine among the top talent in the indie game scene.

This is the first time I've entered Dream Build Play, however I thought it would be a great way to get more people looking at the game and hopefully playing it too!

Of course!

It's quite hard for indie developers to make a name for themselves in this highly competitive industry. Participating in Dream Build Play gives indies a chance to get the kind of exposure they really need for their games to be noticed.

I had started a design document even before I met Mattias or Sang, however the document mainly consisted of how I wanted to flesh out the coloring concept and had little to do with game mechanics. Most of the mechanics and storyline evolved naturally over the course of developing the game. Personally, the designing and brainstorming sessions were the most interesting parts of the process to me. On the other hand, I was new to programming so every technical difficulty I ran into required research on how to solve it. This was both time consuming and not very much fun.

Kaleidoscope has four distinct worlds to play through to keep the game feeling fresh and fun. Each world has its own unique art style, music, and gameplay mechanics. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough time to include all of these features in the build for Dream Build Play. Needless to say, we will be adding a considerable amount of content and polish to the game before it's released.

I would map out all of the main systems that the game required on paper to make sure I had a clear vision of what the framework would look like before I started programming.

I really like the process of prototyping, testing, and tweaking so I would certainly do that again.

This is my first experience with the XNA Framework. The idea of being able to create games for the Xbox 360 myself was what really influenced me to try out XNA Game Studio. There wasn't one specific resource I used when trying to learn the framework. I found that some concepts are easier to learn through samples, while others are easier to learn through tutorials, so it's best to tap into as many different resources as you can.

I implemented the Farseer Physics Engine into my framework and for the most part it went quite smoothly. They also have a knowledgeable community that's always willing to help. I believe in giving back to the community so I wouldn't hesitate to make any of my code public if it would help somebody.

XNA Game Studio is an excellent framework to start programming games on. It has many useful libraries that take care of low level tasks which enable you to really focus on the actual game programming.

It was actually a breeze to get the game up and running on the Xbox 360... at 2 frames per second. Using the profiling monitors included in XNA Game Studio, I found out very quickly that the Xbox 360 doesn't like intensive math and it requires you to be somewhat crafty with your code to avoid such bottlenecks.

While I started the project using XNA 3.0, I switched over to 3.1 mid way through development. I took advantage of the new sound effect API and video player features as a result of the upgrade.

It's going to take longer than you think.

We will definitely consider using XNA Game Studio to make another game in the future.

We will still be working on Kaleidoscope for a little while yet, however our team works very well together and we are always bouncing new ideas off of one another so expect many more games from us in the future!

It is quite likely that we will create more games for the Indie Game portal for a few reasons: We are familiar with XNA Game Studio, the development costs are relatively low, and it's the easiest way to get our games onto the Xbox 360.

Making games takes a lot of hard work but you feel an indescribable sense of accomplishment and satisfaction when all the pieces fit together in the end. I am so grateful to be making games with two phenomenally talented people. I'd also like to thank the people behind Dream Build Play for this wonderful opportunity.