I recently sat down with Xbox Live Indie Games developer, Hotwave Games.  They’re the makers of the hit game, Avatar Wave: Snowball Fight and one of a handful of developers who actually give you something to do with your Avatars.  It’s only 240 Microsoft Points so pony up and fire off those snowballs.

Where did the concept for Avatar Wave: Snowball Fight come from?

We planned to make a sport game for family and friends in the winter holiday after finishing the update of Gamerbots.  A picture of our Avatars playing snowball fights came into our mind.  Then we started to design several gameplay mechanics on throwing snowballs.  We wanted to keep the gameplay simple so that everyone can easily pick up and play it.  The current gameplay is inspired from tennis.  Knocking down our friends instead of passing balls to them seems more interesting to us.

Can you tell us what you’re working on next?

Going into 2010, we are reviewing our achievements last year and planning the direction of our future games.  Avatar Wave: Bowling may be the next title we will work on.  It is an upgraded version of our previous title, Bowling X, with Avatars and more game modes.  We will announce it once we start the development.

Is Xbox Live Indie Games the first platform you’ve developed for or have you developed games prior?

Xbox Live Indie Games is the first platform we have put our polished games on.  Before selling games on the platform, we created several game demos for testing ideas and techniques.  We would like to create games of different genres and on different platforms in the future.

Being a small independent team, how difficult is it to “break through” with a hit game?

It is hard to make a game that we think is new and interesting.  We can make an interesting game (in our view) but it does not mean that people will buy it.  Players buy a game due to many reasons…some can be controlled by us but mostly not.  What we can do is try to do better in our Trial modes to persuade the players and to do some marketing.

How does it help having a company like FiftyOne Marketing reach out to help get your game more exposure?

FiftyOne Marketing helps us to save a lot of time and effort on marketing our games!  We just simply gave them some information and they helped us by using their networking power.  They really did a great job on getting more players to know about our games.

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Thanks for the checking out the interview with Hotwave Games ladies and gents.  I hope you enjoyed a little inside scoop on the life of these Indie Games developers out there.  If you haven’t tried Avatar Wave: Snowball Fight, you can queue it up for download on Xbox.com and get a taste of snowballs in your face…your Avatar face that is.