The IGF (Independent Games Festival) aims to encourage innovation in game development and to recognize independent game developers advancing the medium. This year, Game Developer sat down with the finalists for the IGF's Nuovo and Grand Prize nominees ahead of GDC to explore the themes, design decisions, and tools behind each entry. Game Developer and GDC are sibling organizations under Informa.UFO 50, nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at this year's IGF awards, is a collection of fifty games across several genres created by multiple different developers. It's an exploration of the 8-bit visual style that draws from modern design while also telling the story of a fictional video game company that created them all.Game developer caught up with Derek Yu, one of the developers that worked together to create this collection of games, to discuss the rules and limitations they put in place so that the work of several different developers would still feel like part of a cohesive whole, the thoughts that went into tying all of these works together through a fictional game studio's library of titles, and creating a sense of discovery in the player through this varied collection of games to play.Who are you, and what was your role in developing UFO 50?Related:I'm Derek and I was one of the indie game developers that collaborated on making UFO 50.What's your background in making games?I grew up designing games on paper and eventually used Klik & Play to make freeware games. My first commercial game was Aquaria, which was followed by Spelunky, Spelunky 2, and most recently, UFO 50.How did you come up with the concept for UFO 50?The concept for UFO 50 came from wanting to make a game with my friend Jon Perry, who I've known since we were kids. I was inspired by how we used to make small Klik & Play games together as "Blackeye Software", as well as my gaming experiences in the 80s and 90s. I spent a lot of time browsing collections of games on floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and websites, and also in arcades.What development tools were used to build your game?We used GameMaker Studio 2 to develop the game.UFO 50 collects many, many different games from multiple creators together into a single cohesive (yet varied) package meant to simulate the history of a fictional game development studio, UFOSOFT. What challenges did you face in ensuring so many different works would all operate well together? What sorts of constraints/design rules did you put in place to make things feel like the works of a single studio?Related:It was important to find good rules that were just flexible enough to give us direction and allow us to work quickly. For a project like this, it's easy to have too many limitations or not enough. Early on, we decided, for example, that we would stick to a 32-color palette and some simple color rules, but we wouldn't be very strict on the number of sprites on the screen. We aimed for a strong authentic "vibe".In an interview with PC Gamer, it is mentioned that changes were made to Barbuta, the first game in UFO 50's chronology, to make it feel more like a developer's first game. How did the overarching narrative of UFOSOFT affect the design of some of the other games? The design of the collection as a whole?For the most part, we massaged the designs of our games into the right place as we went along without having to make many drastic changes over the course of development. Barbuta was already a primitive-feeling game to begin with, but after we decided it would be UFO Soft's first game, we pushed that existing feeling even more. We always started with games we simply wanted to make for ourselves.What challenges came from creating an overarching narrative of sorts within all of the works? How do you tell the story of a fictional developer across their varied works?Related:We drew from a lot of references for UFO Soft's history, including real life video game history and our own development experiences. It was something that we discussed and kept in mind throughout the process, and we made efforts to draw out similar themes and recurring ideas as we worked (like overlapping characters and locations, for example). But we only tied the story together fully toward the end once we had most of the pieces (the 50 games) in place. Jon, in particular, did a lot of work tying the narrative together in that final stage.How did you choose the games you wanted to make for this project? What thoughts went into creating so many different play experiences? Into making sure each game felt unique in its own way?WeJon, Eirik (Suhrke), and Istarted by brainstorming game ideas and we all had a lot of ideas we wanted to try making. Later on, we were joined by Paul (Hubans), Tyriq (Plummer), and Ojiro (Fumoto), who also contributed their own ideas. Everyone on the team has their own stylistic quirks and we celebrated those differencesso it wasn't hard to make the games feel unique from one another. There was a natural instinct to draw out what made each game stand out and put that at the forefront.Collecting these games in a single package feels a bit like downloading a library of ROMs for an old console - this sense that you're suddenly drowning in an excess of games and can idly drift through them, seeing what grabs you from names, screenshots, and play. What appealed to you about capturing a journey of discovery within UFO 50? Into capturing that particular kind of time spent delving into the unknown world of a game company or console?That feeling of discovery is something everyone on the UFO 50 team cares deeply about. For me, it started with learning about games, and as I grew older, I started to get more and more interested in the history of games and their development, too. It's become a pursuit I enjoy as much as playing or making games and I wanted to capture it within UFO 50. But it wouldn't feel genuine if we simply led players around the collection and pointed them at things. There had to be real exploration involved.UFO 50 took a great deal of time to develop (8 years) and required many developers to make many separate games. How did you maintain your motivation and drive across the many years it took to make the game? How did you keep up creativity and mental clarity while working across multiple different games and needing to make each feel like a separate, full title as opposed to a minigame?It really helped to work with creative people that share a similar passion for the artform. We were also passing our games around a lot, and with 50 games there was always something new to experience. One day I'd be doing some design and programming on a game I was directing and the next day I might be testing someone else's game or helping them polish the graphics. Or maybe someone would send me a build of a game that I hadn't played in a long time and I'd realize that it improved a lot! While there were a fair share of challenges over the years, the development of UFO 50 often felt like a very long game jam between friends inspiring each other back and forth.What do you hope the player takes away from this fictionalized snapshot of an era in game development?One of the most gratifying things for us has been seeing players get interested in genres or styles of games that they never thought they'd be into (or perhaps didn't know existed!). We've also seen some younger players who were not around for the 80s and 90s get interested in wanting to explore that era. We're happy any time UFO 50 sparks up excitement for games and history like that.