I had the opportunity to have a chat with Luke Hodorowicz about his plans for Banished and his experience in the gaming industry.

Luke Hodorowicz is the one man show behind Shining Rock Software, and has been working on Banished for getting on for two years. Banished is a frontier/settlers era city-building game focused around survival. The challenges in Banished come from the struggle to survive. Can you help your town get enough food? What about clothing? People need to stay warm in the harsh winters.

It’s fair to say that 2012 was a fantastic year for indie game developers. With Valve’s Steam platform leading the charge and console publishers realising the potential of their online space we saw a massive boom in small time games.

One of the highlights of 2012 was Thomas Was Alone, a game created by Mike Bithell. With Thomas Was Alone, Mike managed to create a game that was beautifully simple, yet deceptively challenging, add to that a now BAFTA award-winning performance from Danny Wallace as the game’s Narrator, and a score from David Housden, and it’s no surprise that the game was a success; so much so that the game will now be ported to PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita.

After the popularity of Racer Driver: Grid from Codemasters, there has been a lot of buzz and excitement surrounding the octane filled sequel. I had a chance to catch up with Toby Evan-Jones, Associate Producer over at Codemasters to find out just what we should expect from the rough and ready racer.

Every year there are a bunch of great indie games that come out. These are seen as the gems of gaming years gone by as most have a throwback to the older ways of gaming. So what happens when a University project like Dream makes it onto the scene? With the main goal of changing an already established genre, in this case, exploration games from what we all know and love, Ashley at Hypersloth Games spoke a little on the matter as I threw him a few questions.

It’s been a few months now since Merlin: The Game made it’s appearance on Facebook. Tim Bowers, caught up with Henrique Ollifers, Co-Founder of the award winning Bossa Studios, to see how the game was doing and what is in store now the TV show is coming to an end.