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Puppy Games a really small studio: two developers, one of whom seems to do all the art as well. One of them lives in the UK while the other lives (lived?) in Spain. They do this part-time, working contract jobs to subsidize their development time.

Revenge of the Titans is their fourth game together, and it builds upon their three earlier games--they re-use characters/monsters, the game engine, and elements of game play (RotT is a sequel to Titan Attacks). They've been working on RotT for 4 years as of January 2011 and it looks like they've spent most of the last year tweaking it!

To be honest, their first couple games (Ultratron and Titan Attacks) don't really grab me, though Droid Assault is starting to get really interesting. RotT, though, is pretty awesome. It's really polished and has some very cool and subtle graphics and gameplay aspects. I can appreciate that they've taken time to carefully decide what features to keep and what doesn't fit. These guys have built up a cool Java-powered engine and set of tools over the years.

I've been feeling burnt out with my jobs recently, and the romace of game development is alluring. It'd be neat-o to write code that involved monsters and cool graphic effects of things blowing up. It'd be neat to work on a project with a friend over several years. It'd be cool to polish something until it shines like this.