The 2009 Independent Games Festival celebrates independent and student video games. In this series, GameCareerGuide is sneaking peek at some of the games in the student competition.

In this Q&A, we learn from Guillaume Patrux about Puzzle Wars, a puzzle-shooter hybrid built by six students from ENJMIN -- The Graduate School of Games and Interactive Media in France.

Game title: Puzzle Wars

School: ENJMIN -- The Graduate School of games and interactive media, France

Game description: Puzzle Wars is a game in which you make war. Groups of people are progressing on the map by blocks. These groups can be compounded of either civilians, terrorists or a mix of both. You should organize these groups in lines, but they can progress forming blocks of weird shape. Hopefully, you have some weapons to model the blocks (more or less) as you want. Fill a line with only terrorists and our planes will come and napalm them. Fill a line with only civilians and we will send a rescue helicopter. If you fill a line with both terrorists and civilians, we will have no choice but to napalm them all. If the crowd fills the whole grid, we will have to leave; Make sure this never happens.

Q: Tell us how Puzzle Wars came to be.

A: At the end of our first year of master degree at ENJMIN, we are asked to develop a short game in teams of two to six students selected among the different specialties taught in the school.

I previously had the idea to merge a puzzle game and a shooter, though it was rather shooter-oriented than puzzle-oriented, but I had neither the time nor the means to realize it. I kept working on the idea and presented it to the other students as a first-year project. A team showed up, and Puzzle Wars was born.

Q: What was your goal in developing the game?

A: As the project was part of the school program, there where some rules we had to respect. First of all, the game had to be developed within only three months. Then, the game had to be self-documented and anyone should be able to play it. Finally, the player should have a complete experience of the game mechanics in 10 minutes.

Besides these rules, we wanted the game to be fun with a good replay value -- that's why we made it multiplayer. It was also very important to make it as polished as possible, as it was the very first time we took part in a game development for most of us. This was the opportunity to show what we were capable of.

Q: What do you think is the game's greatest asset? What sets it apart from other games in the IGF?

A: I think we succeeded in making a really fun game, easy to learn through the tutorial, but hard to master. Puzzle Wars is a multiplayer confrontation game. Even the single-player mode versus an artificial intelligence is based on multiplayer patterns. This multiplayer core gives the game a high replay value.

Lastly, the players can experience original arcade game mechanics based on a mix between puzzle games and shooter games.

Q: What drew you to focus on war as the overt theme for the game?