Matt Davis of Barker's Crest Studio hit the Xbox Live Indie scene with Easy Golf, a neat little golf game that was far surpassing any other indie game on the service at the time. Now he's found the use of Avatars, and has found tremendous success using Xbox Avatars with Avatar Golf and Home Run Challenge.

We ask what he's found about developing for the Xbox Live Indie Game scene, and where he plans to go in 2010.

What were you most happy with during the game's development?

Matt Davis: As a coder the most enjoyable aspects of building a game, or any project for that matter, are the little victories. For example, when conceptualizing each game I try to pick out a few coding challenges I have never done before and incorporate them into the game.

For Easy Golf, one of the challenges was building a course designer and then implementing a peer-to-peer sharing system where gamers could share their created courses with others through Xbox LIVE. Another concept I was interested in tackling was online multiplayer, which turned out really well.

Eventually Microsoft released the XNA Framework version 3.1 which gave us the ability to render avatars. This feature gave way to Avatar Golf, which was a natural extension of the Easy Golf code base. Animating and rendering the avatars turned out to be a pretty fun and rewarding experience.

As for the Home Run Challenge, I wanted to see what it would be like to create a game with an extremely short development cycle and release it onto the marketplace for the lowest price. My coding challenges for this game were rendering a large, animated avatar crowd along with peer-to-peer high score sharing. I am really pleased with how the crowd component worked out. At any time there are just over 10,000 individual crowd members in the stadium.

What were you least happy with, in retrospect?

MD: There really isn't anything I'm not happy about development wise. XNA is a relatively easy technology to learn and with the Xbox there is very little hardware constraints to worry about. Your imagination is your only limit.

One thing that bothers me a little bit is that I wish a lot more developers who release games onto the service would take a little more pride in their work so Indie Games as a whole would have a much better reputation. I've been seeing a lot of evidence lately that gamers are warming up to Indie Games as we've been releasing quite a few quality experiences in the past few months. Hopefully we can get some more top shelf developers, artists, and musicians involved and keep this trend going.

What is the biggest lesson you're going to apply to the next game you make?

MD: Time management. With each new release I build up a stronger code base that helps reduce time on future projects. Anyone interested in releasing a polished, fully featured Indie game should make budgeting time a high priority especially if you have a full time job and a family.

Random Thought?

MD: For quite some time Indie Games had a pretty bad reputation. Developers were angry because they weren't swimming in cash and gamers were angry because 9 out of every 10 games on the service were absolutely terrible. The good news is that the situation today is much different. There is plenty of money to be made if you put out a unique, professional, polished, and interesting experience that isn't otherwise currently available on the Xbox 360. More and more quality games are being released onto the service and the gamers are noticing. Now is as good of a time as any to build that game you always dreamed of making. If you make the right game there is a large enough audience of Indie gamers to make it worth your while financially.