The 2010 IGF Student Winners have been announced and 10 different titles landed in the spotlight. At the festival in March the 10 will compete for an overall Best Student Game prize, but to get to this point they definitely had to be special. We’ve dug through them all and contacted their developers in a series of interviews called The Future of Gaming. Because if anyone is going to take over the industry, it’s these bright minds.

The French students behind the physics based liquid-motion title Puddle took a moment to answer a few questions about their game and talk about their future. You can download the game from the website right now, if you want to give it a spin before hearing what the creators are all about.

Here is a copy of the email conversation we had:

DIYgamer: So I finally managed to save enough liquid to finish the title. Great work on the game. Can you introduce yourselves and your positions on the project?

Puddle Team: We are six students at ENJMIN, a French video games school. We come from different backgrounds and specialized in different areas. The team is composed of : Pierre Lemasson (graphic designer), Martial Potron (level designer / producer), Antoine Guerchais (programmer), Hoël Jacq (graphic designer), Rémi Gillig (programmer), Victor Parent (sound designer).

DIY: How did you all come together to work on this project? Did the school assign groups or were you able to choose who you wanted to work with?

Puddle: The idea comes from an English course we had where we had to imagine a video game concept and present it to the class. The idea was to play with chemical products and make reactions with different fluids. In the first year, we have to make a project for 3 months and this idea came back at this time. The groups are not assigned by the school but instead we get together by feelings between the persons and the game concept.

DIY: What other notable projects had you guys worked on before getting to this point?

Puddle: Well, no one from this team did a project like this before so this was kind of our first team project in video games.

DIY: What other games and developers helped inspire you guys along the way?

Puddle: It’s obvious we were inspired by the independent scene at the time which means mainly World of Goo but also LocoRoco of course. These games are recent milestones in video games. Other games would be The Incredible Machine for experimentations and Sonic for gameplay and level design. From arts, we were inspired by videos from Fischli and Weiss related to Goldberg Machines, also we can cite Jean Tinguely for his machines.

DIY: As a student team, what were the most difficult elements you still had to learn to create the finished product?

Puddle: At this school, we all already have diplomas and backgrounds which help us to get ready for projects.

DIY: How did you decide what an appropriate amount of liquid to collect was in each level?

Puddle: Well, it’s just create and retry. The objective for the exercise is to create a game which is playable by a “non-gamer” and finished in 10 minutes. So, we playtested as much as possible our levels with people who came around (other students, friends, etc.) to tune them to the best we could. That means that some levels were so hard to finish that we lowered the amount of liquid required.

DIY: Can you discuss the physics in the game?

Puddle: We quickly found a research paper on fluid physics in 3D and adapted it to 2D for our purposes. The biggest problem was to integrate these fluid physics with a normal physics engine. Another bottleneck was the performance which was horrible on some levels and a lot of objects and a lot of collisions. In the end, the game runs smoothly on Xbox 360 as well as PC because we used XNA and were able to optimize it.

DIY: Since you developed the game using XNA, when can we expect to find it on Xbox Live?

Puddle: It is very likely that it will be out although we can’t tell any release date for now.

DIY: What parts of the game are you most proud of?

Puddle: The last level with our own little heads which are flooded by a black fluid. This level was created during the last night of the development and it was a quick idea which turned out to be really fun to do. Also, we were able to create a level editor which enabled us to create all the levels in about a week and a half. We still use it internally from time to time and maybe it could be great to release it some day but it needs a serious revamp and documentation.

DIY: Is there anything you would have done differently if you could do it all over again?

Puddle: Of course, 3 months is too short to include all the ideas we had for this game. We still have these ideas around and I guess we could take some time to create a new game based on these.

DIY: What’s next for all of you? Do you plan to collaborate again?

Puddle: Well, we finished our first year in this school in June 2009 and three of us got the opportunity to work together again. We are now making a bigger video game which is part of the exercise for the second year.

DIY: Are you guys going to make it out to San Francisco for IGF?

Puddle: Yes, we found enough money to be able to fly there, it’s not so easy to come from France. We will be three from the team there.

DIY: What do you think of the other student titles that made the cut this year?

Puddle: The graphics of “Devil’s Tuning Fork” are simply amazing. We love the gameplay concept of “Continuity” and “Igneous” seems to be fun. We didn’t try them because we didn’t have much time but every one of them is really inspiring.

DIY: What advice would you give someone considering pursuing an education in game design?

Puddle: Well, at the school there are game designers but we didn’t have any game designer in this team. We all were part of the game design and we guess that it’s one the best ways to build a project together. For us, a good game designer is someone who is able to understand all the aspects involved in making a video game and knows how to listen to others’ ideas and critics and use them to improve the game design. Also, try to keep focused on the game mechanics rather than storytelling.

DIY: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Puddle: Thanks for your questions and good luck to all of the other teams. See you at GDC!

You can download Puddle here and play it right now.

Full Series: The Future of Gaming
*Ulitsa Dimitrova
*Puddle
*Devil’s Tuning Fork
*Boryokudan Rue
*Continuity
*Dreamside Maroon
*Igneous
*Paper Cakes
*Puzzle Bloom
*Spectre