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XBLA Fans recently had the opportunity to chat with Pawel Lekki, COO at Exor Studios. Exor’s Zombie Driver HD released on XBLA this past October, and Lekki was more than willing to talk about the title as well as his background in game development.

Pawel, please tell us a few things about yourself outside of the world of gaming.

I think there isn’t much outside the world of gaming because I spend most of my day at work to be honest. But if I’m not working I enjoy travelling by car around Europe. Moving around in your own vehicle gives a lot of freedom, and I annually make road trips with a few friends. Our record braking trip so far was visiting 11 countries in 7 days with a total of 5000km on the road.

How did you get into game development?

The first gaming-related thing I did [actually involved] classic role playing games. I was a game master for 5 years, and together with our team we created our own version of one of the popular RPG systems. I guess you could say we started modding with pen and paper.

When it comes to traditional computer game development, I started by making levels for various games with my brother. The first game for which we made our own maps was Age of Empires, then StarCraft, and later we moved on to first person shooters like Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 and Half-Life. The first Make Something Unreal contest actually played an important role in our journey because it made us go public and share our works on the internet. After that we started working on mods for Half-Life and informally started Exor as a modding group. Our first public mod was ‘D.I.P.R.I.P.’ for Half-Life 2 and because of our work on it we were all hired by a Finnish mobile game development company called Gamelion. That was the beginning of my professional game development career which started 7 years ago.

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Toylogic’s free-to-play multiplayer title Happy Wars – which has “sold” an impressive 1.2 million copies since its release in October – has a new title update available that tweaks …
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[springboard type=”video” id=”634507″ player=”xbla001″ width=”640″ height=”400″ ]

A demo for the Grounding Inc. and LAND HO! co-developed on-rails shooter Crimson Dragon suddenly appeared on the Japanese Xbox Live Marketplace over the weekend sans a formal announcement of its existence. Japanese XBLA players interested in test-flying a dragon were required to have at least a Silver Xbox Live account and be willing to part with a wallet-obliterating 4,294,967,295 MSP. The demo release, along with its ludicrous listing price, was a mistake, but it is said to be in a playable state.

Ground Inc.’s Yukio Futatsugi (director, Panzer Dragoon Saga) responded to questions about the nature of the demo over Twitter by saying that it was “mistakenly” (Google Translate) released, but that it was “actually playable.” XBLA Fans’ unofficial man in Japan, @lifelower, reports that the demo initially appeared to be a limited version of the full Crimson Dragon game, but Futatsugi shot that notion down, explaining that the download was a dedicated demo. The game designer also mentioned that he has been in contact with Microsoft over the accidental release.

Microsoft pulled the demo down on New Year’s Eve, but lifelower was able to grab footage of the English version of the game and toss it up on YouTube. The video, posted above, shows off the game’s menus and one of the six playable dragons soaring through the skies and mixing it up with airborne baddies in jungle and arctic levels.

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Recently, Xbox Live suffered some technical difficulties that hindered purchases and cloud saves for users. After a few days, everything has been put back to normal with the saves …
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Dying happens a lot in Spelunky, but up until now the game has caused some unfair deaths. The game’s first patch was released recently, and it sets out to improve …
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Deck 13 and dtp entertainment have announced that action RPG Blood Knights will release on XBLA on February 20 2013 for 1200 MSP. According to Deck 13 and dtp, Blood …
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It’s the gift that keeps being given, it seems: Mojang’s runaway indie success Minecraft continues to sell through the roof, reportedly chalking up an additional 453,000 sales across all …
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What we are playing is a weekly column published on Sunday. Select members of the team talk about the games they’ve been playing over the past week and which they’re …
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Be a pro at defending The Shire
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If you’ve somehow missed out on Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead, or have been on the fence on whether it’s for you, you’re in for some luck – the first of the game’s five episodes, “A New Day,” is currently as cheap as free on the Xbox Live Marketplace, giving waffling players the perfect excuse to try out one of the biggest surprise hits of 2012.

Telltale PR rep Job Stauffer confirmed on Twitter that the debut episode will enjoy its 100 percent discount through Monday. Other episodes sell for 400 MSP a pop, meaning the entire first “season” of the game is available at one of the lowest prices it’s yet seen.

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