To kick off X-Play's unprecedented coverage of the 2008 Penny Arcade Expo, we've asked each of the PAX 10, the Expo's top ten highest rated indie games of the last year, to answer some questions for us.

For Schizoid, we got our questions answered by Jamie Fristrom and Bill Dugan, who shared some of their experiences as independant game developers.

G4: How long was the game in development?

BD: Schizoid took 20 months from conception to completion.

JF: What Bill said - that's from first line of code to on the box.

G4: Where did you get the idea/inspiration for the game?

BD: Jamie was at Microsoft’s “Gamefest” developer conference, sitting there drinking some coffee, and thinking about the Xbox 360 controller, and it occurred to him: What would it be like to control 2 ships with the 2 thumbsticks? It turned out to be really challenging and interesting, and then our friend Richard Garfield suggested it should be a 2-player co-op game, and that turned out to be even more fun (by about six times), and everything snowballed from there. Jamie’s original idea made it into the game as our uberchallenging “Uberschizoid” game mode.

JF: What Bill said.

G4: What's your all-time favorite game?

BD: It has to be Civilization.

JF: My fondest gaming memories are of Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns. We played RTS's all the time back at Treyarch, and Kohan was our favorite: it's really different from most RTS's.

G4: If you could have dinner with any one developer, who would it be and what would you eat?

BD: I think probably Brian Reynolds, and we would dine upon the livers of our enemies.

JF: Tim Schafer. Chilled monkey brains.

G4: With unlimited resources, what kind of game would you make?

BD: A global wargame that is also somehow an action game.

JF: A spy MMO where some of the players are agents and others are controllers/hackers - like Tom Cruise & Ving Rhames in Mission: Impossible or Arnold Schwarzenegger & Tom Arnold in True Lies or like Molly & Case in Neuromancer. Probably wouldn't work because most people would want to be Arnie and there wouldn't be enough Tom Arnold's to go around...(although I myself want to play the hacker.)

G4: Which existing franchise would you like to work on?

BD: I already got to work on Spider-Man, so I’ll consider that off the table. Blade Runner or Tron would be immensely satisfying and fun.

JF: Batman.

G4: Where do you see indie gaming going in the future?

BD: As with indie film, there will be a vast pool of OK games that don’t really make money, and there will be a dozen games a year that are great and attract 90% of the attention.

JF: It's where our Quentin Tarantinos and our Pulp Fictions come from and will keep coming from - Id Software was once indy, after all, right?

G4: What piece of advice would you give to someone looking to develop their own indie game?

BD: Two things – make a lot of games, little prototypes with programmer-art only, so you can learn about your own creative process and how to identify and reject the bad ideas, and polish the few gems that you come up with; and it does help to get a job in The Industry for several years first, on the developer side, and ship a couple of games before you decide you want to do it by yourself.

JF: If you're looking to develop your own indy game - what's stopping you? Just do it.

G4: What was the biggest lesson learned from your development process?

BD: Yet again I was taught that the last 10% of development takes about 50% of the time.

JF: I was really impressed by Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias's approach to level design - they came up with hundreds of ideas, some roughly sketched, some just titles, some unique combinations of enemies, giving a rich palette of gameplay varieties. I'd bring the same approach to Big Games.

G4: Besides the obvious—making games—what are some of your hobbies?

BD: Playing games, playing with my kids, playing Magic.

JF: D&D - and not on a computer: in person! - once a week. And lately, letterboxing with the family.

G4: Favorite movie, food, sports team, video game character, and actor/actress?

BD: Brazil, unagi, the poor Seahawks, Mario, and quite possibly Guy Pearce, solely because of Memento.

JF: Royal Tenenbaums, chateaubriand, San Diego Chargers, Manny Calavera (and Bill's favorite is Floyd from Planetfall - he's just somehow forgotten), Gary Oldman.