First things first... congratulations on completing your 100th game, Nitrome Must Die! That's a milestone few developers ever see. Do you have any advice for anyone who might want to follow in your footsteps, or even just dip their toes into the game-designing pool for the first time? Thanks.... I wish I could say there was a master plan that others could learn from but in truth we just made games as many do for the love of doing it and it only kept going because people kept supporting us by playing which we are very grateful for. I think the best advice I could give is to not go in with any great expectations. If you love making games make the best one you can and see what happens... if you have a talent for it you will find ways to make enough money from it to keep doing it. If not you at least gave it your best shot and poured your heart into a project that hopefully remains special to you.

Perhaps on top of that as actual advice I would say to make sure you retain full rights to your games... if you have a success you want to be able to use that to push yourself further forward so be careful what deals you make. Also, although advertising can ultimately be the most financially rewarding way to finance yourself I have yet to hear of anyone who could instantly grow an audience big enough for it to cover costs from the beginning so you will need to use some form of sponsorship or licensing to fund things from the start.

You've created so many games, and you rarely take the simple way out by making "just" a platformer, or a shooter, or an arcade game. This past year in particular you've tried a lot of different things with your titles. Which one would you say was the biggest challenge to design and create, and which one taught you the most? We feel that for a project to be worthwhile it should offer the player something they have never seen before. If you manage to make a game that is the best of its genre then that is probably worthwhile too but it's hard to imagine doing that in a flash game. When ad revenue dictates the time you can afford to spend on a game it is not really realistic to make something better than what retail titles have managed in the past. In making something new you have not got the same comparisons being made so you can explore your concept and keep things fresh without needing to outdo anyone.

In direct answer to your question Steamlands was by far the biggest title we have ever taken on (though Nitrome Must Die took a long time too). It was particularly challenging as it was hard to see if it would all come together to be a fun game in the end and it was many months into the project before we got to that point. Unfortunately I think the biggest lesson we have learnt with our bigger games is that spending more time on them really does not lead to much if any extra revenue. Though this was suspected from the outset it is never the less frustrating for us as we have been developing games for a while now and it would be nice to make some of our games as large as our passion dictates. We are considering experimenting more with a game split into parts to counteract this but it may be more realistic to be left for other formats where the extra time would hopefully be rewarded with the extra revenue needed to cover such a time investment. Interestingly we learnt this lesson from Steamlands but still went on to spend almost as much time on Nitrome Must Die so perhaps we will stubbornly still do it on occasion just for the reward of the game we get to make.

Looking back over all of the games you've done over the years very few of them have gotten sequel love. Are there any games you'd like to go back and remake, with everything you've earned now, or even just a personal favourite you'd like to experiment more with by making a new installment? That is actually a very interesting and well-timed question as it is something that has been discussed a lot in the office recently and I am happy to say that as a result we have some of our older games that we are going to go back to. We have not even made sequels to some of our most popular games which may seem strange... the thing is that we do intend to make follow ups to a lot of our games but for various reasons never get round to them. If you don't make a sequel quite soon after the original game things tend to move on and by the time you bring it up again the idea of making something substantial enough to outdo the original can often seem out of scope for the time we can afford to spend on it.

Without naming the actual games you can look out for some more sequels and even remakes from us in the future. :)

Flash isn't the only fish in the pond anymore. Have you ever thought about trying to create a game with, say, HTML5 or Unity? Have you experimented with it at all? We have nothing against other web technologies but at the moment we see no advantages to using HTML5 or Unitly. For us there needs to be a good reason to look to new technology for what it will allow us to do and I think in that instance it is much more interesting to look to other potential platforms and the best languages/tools involved in getting there such as iOS/Android/Steam/download based stores rather than other ways to make a game on the same platform. That is not to say though that we never would look at any other platform...something might change that makes it more viable or interesting to us. :)

We're right on the cusp of a new year, and hopefully 2012 will be just as packed with Nitrome as 2011 was! Are you already planning your "next big thing", or are you just taking and developing ideas as they come? Anything you've got in mind that you can share with/tease us with? We have big plans for 2012 some of which have been in the works through much of 2011 but it would spoil things to let it all out of the bag so soon. I can say though that there will definitely be some big updates to our site, some big new games both sequels and otherwise and something else not related to flash too. :)