If you’re a MMORPG player, have ever known a MMORPG player, or just known anyone who just might spend a little bit too much time playing video games, then The Guild is for you. The award-winning show consists of ten brief webisodes, and chronicles the trials of a MMORPG guild that decides to meet in person to defeat a real life problem. Wackiness ensues.

Take a few steps into Polarity and the game looks like a typical platformer; run and jump to navigate from one end of a 2-D level to the other. Soon, however, you’ll discover that your avatar’s suit is magnetic, and so are most of the surfaces in the game’s four levels. From there, it’s all about manipulating your suit’s polarity and the strength of your magnetism to fight gravity and manipulate objects in the environment. It looks and plays like a platformer, but it’s a puzzle game at heart.

The game was actually developed by a group of students from Carnegie Mellon University. We talked to Daniel Bryner, Howard Braham, and Przemyslaw Iwanowski how a game development education can be handy, how playtesting molds accessibility, and the game’s future. Hit the jump to read on and then go play the game.

While Project Aftermath might appear at a glance to be a typical Real Time Strategy game, it’s not. Get your hands on it and you’ll realize it isn’t just about winning and losing—it’s about points. The idea sounds weird, but it’s really a self-correcting difficulty selector that makes room in the genre for neophytes and experts a like. Starting armaments cost points, and good performance earns them. There’s no cap on the special abilities that units can use, but they cost you a bit of score with each use. Neophytes can play armed to the teeth (and in deep point debt), actually winning games and having fun, while experts who win with little more than sticks and harsh language score big on the leaderboards.

Lee Hickey stopped by from England and told us all about this and other ways that Project Aftermath makes the RTS genre more accessible. Read on for that, Lee’s thoughts on explosions and their importance to design, and what you can do to bring skilled players and new players together without a one-sided bloodbath. Check out the demo too.

Mike Henry of Twisted Pixel Games was on hand to tell us about his adorable purple people eater, The Maw. The game is a third-person action adventure that you’d get if Jak and Daxter crossbred with Ico, and the baby was a craven purple eating machine (and adorable to boot). The player actually controls Frank, a blue alien with a high-tech leash that in turn controls the Maw. You direct the little predator to eat and grow and do all the heavy lifting that requires no courage at all. Frank gets stuck with everything else.

The Maw doesn’t have a scheduled release date yet, but you can check out the trailer at the official site to get a sense of what to expect when it hits XBLA. In the meantime, click the jump to find out more about Frank, how the Maw got so cute, and how feasible it is to make a lot from a little as a developer.

Andrew Williams and Andy Ray took a few minutes to talk about their team’s entry to the PAX 10: Impulse. It’s a physics game in the same vein as Strange Attractors 2 where the player navigates a magnetic avatar from point to point in complex levels loaded with positive and negative surfaces. Adding a wrinkle to the play model, players can give their avatars a little explosive boost to circumvent the tyranny of magnetism. It’s somewhere between playing with magnets and rocket jumping.

In addition to their game, click on the jump to hear about the design challenges of attraction and repulsion, and how to use a game’s camera to focus exploration gameplay and avoid tedious meandering.

Joe Rheaume is sole developer of the flash game Chronotron, and we had a chance to chat with him about his time-traveling robots. Chronotron is actually a tricky game to describe, though we did give it a shot in our earlier review. It turns out that Joe is better at it.

The game is free to play at Kongregate (and many other venues), but read on for more on what it is, how it works, as well as Joe’s thoughts on business models for Flash game developers.

PAX is big. PAX is really big. Big Download is reporting that the final total for PAX 2008 attendees was 58,500. Given PAX 2007 attendance was 37,000, and this year’s projected estimate was between 45,000 and 50,000, that’s a lot of nerds. Our one-man content provider turned to his trusty web monkey, let her loose with a camera and (when needed) an audio recorder to help generate content. Our reporting staff now doubled, we felt empowered to cover a bit more of PAX than one person could have covered alone. A tiny bit more.

When we caught up with Dylan Fitterer, creator of Audiosurf while he was tending his PAX 10 booth. Even above the roar of the PAX exhibition floor, Audiosurf was throbbing with heavy bass, so it’s a miracle we managed to have a conversation at all.

That’s to be expected, though, since music is so integral to Audiosurf. The game takes audio tracks in pretty much any common format and analyzes them to make playable levels. Playing those levels consists of piloting a vehicle down a road that’s been crowded with colored blocks, and the music controls just how crowded and how fast you barrel down the road. You spend much of your time ducking and weaving through traffic, though collisions are good too. You collect the color-coded blocks you hit, and chaining blocks of the same color together on a collection grid scores points, and those points end up on a separate leaderboard for each song you play. It’s a little bit Rez, a little bit Tetris Attack, and a little bit Burnout.

The game and demo are presently being hosted on Steam, but read on for Dylan’s under-the-hood explanation of the game mechanics and his thoughts on Steam and digital distribution in general.

We had a chance to chat with Ryan Clark, co-founder and CEO of Grubby Games and therefore of The Amazing Brain Train.

For those unfamiliar with the game, it’s a collection of fifteen brain-teaser minigames in the vein of Brain Age. Unlike most minigame collections however, The Amazing Brain Train is remarkably coherent, and all the games contribute to a single goal: fuelling the Brain train.

It gives the minigames a sense of purpose they might otherwise lack. As your train chugs around, you’ll meet various animals who need errands run–usually train-related errands. So whether you’re counting monkeys as they scurry among bushes, hopping on lily pads to do arithmetic, or dragging ropes to separate cats from dogs, your brainpower is piped into the train and helps make the world a better place. It’s cutesy and simple, but there is more structure than has ever really been given to a brain training game before, and the game’s presentation is remarkably polished. Add to that the fact that the game dynamically adjusts the difficulty of its scalable minigames to be consistently challenging based on player performance, and you have a solid game collection.

If you still need a little convincing to check out the demo, or you’re curious about the finer points of making an accessible puzzle game, it’s all after the jump.

Independent developers have a hard lot. They can be under-funded, minimally marketed, and outright missed in the endlessly chattering internet. However, their sometimes-low profile frees indie devs to do some of the most creative gaming work available today.

This PAX, ten of them were recognized for their innovation, dedication, and development excellence. Pixelsocks.com was lucky to have a chance to chat with team members from each of the PAX 10. Check back daily for each interview.

• The Amazing Brain Train with Ryan Clark
• Audiosurf with Dylan Fitterer
• Chronotron with Joe Rheaume
• Impulse with Andrew Williams and Andy Ray
• The Maw with Mike Henry
• Project Aftermath with Lee Hickey
• Polarity with Daniel Bryner, Howard Braham, and Przemyslaw-Iwanowski
• Schizoid with Richard Garfield
• Strange Attractors 2 with Christopher McGarry
• Sushi Bar Samurai with Casey Muratori