I first encountered Forever while sat at my own kitchen table a few years back. It's a game of space junkers, but with cool neon edges in place of the rust and grit that usually accompanies chop-shop mentalities. That's certainly the case with Captain Forever, a quick-witted splicing of building stuff and dismantling other stuff that encourages you to tool your way around the universe in a ship whose design is entirely mutable. I've always been a bit interested in construction and making things, but when I looked at all the things I've made, that's a really heavy theme running through there.' Seriously, this game is pure joy. But I've got to say, just the other day I listed out all my games and other projects to have a think about them, and I was kind of surprised.

'So on my first full day, I sat down at the kitchen table with a pen and paper and listed all the game ideas I'd been thinking about for a while, and tried to pick which one to do.

Time to start the countdown.ĭid Woods have an image in his head of what a Farbs game should look like? 'It's more like your games choose you,' he laughs when I catch up with him on Skype. It was a good life - I suspect you couldn't make games this relentlessly chirpy if it was anything else - but a trip to GDC ended with Woods calling his partner from San Francisco airport and telling her that he had to quit his job. Rom Check Fail pulped 8-Bit classics into an epileptic fugue where the objective never changed but just about everything else did, while Polychromatic Funk Monkey saw you racing through the background of what looked like some tuned-in 1970s kids' show, rearranging rainbows and leaping from one curved ledge to another as you activated a series of totems. Prior to leaving regular employment, Woods' freeware output was characterised by an antic cheerfulness. With work on a far more elaborate fourth instalment now under way, it seemed like a good time to find out how things are going - and to look back on the journey so far. His launch vehicle of choice was a freeware Flash game called Captain Forever that took him mere weeks to construct, and in the years that followed it has spawned two richly ingenious sequels.

Within a few months he'd reached his destination, spinning through a Petri dish cosmos, blasting whirligig enemies when they swarmed in from all angles, and picking over their remains once the killing was done. In June of 2009, Farbs - who on Earth is often known as Jarrad Woods - quit his job at 2K Australia and set off for the stars.