Jon Perry is one of my favorite game designers working today. He’s also that rare breed that has found critical and commercial success in both digital and physical games.

The latter best represents his output from the past few years, with spectacular releases like the push-your-luck dice game Spots and the 1v1 “lane battler” card game Air, Land, and Sea (a personal favorite of mine) that, though he denies that it "stole" anything from him, was clearly a major inspiration for the mega-hit Marvel Snap.

Other games like Time Barons (designed in conjunction with Derek Yu), arriving near the advent of modern tabletop hobby gaming, seemed to anticipate a lot of its larger motions before they had become fully absorbed and disseminated into what “modern design” means.

All this to say, Jon Perry gets design. He knows how to make games that sing.

So it’s exciting to see him once again flexing his muscle in the digital sphere (and unsurprisingly crushing it) as he and a group of other prominent indie game developers came together to put out the now audacious (and commercial hit!) game UFO50.

UFO 50 is a collection of 50 single and multiplayer games that span a variety of genres, from platformers and shoot 'em ups to puzzle games, roguelites, and RPGs. Our goal is to combine a familiar 8-bit aesthetic with new ideas and modern game design.

The previously-stated pedigree of the game is quite large, with the major contributors coming from the people behind Spelunky, Catacomb Kids, Downwell, as well as Perry himself (credited on nearly 20(!) of the 50 games).

UFO50, nearly 8 years in the making, is a herculean effort of herculean effort. Making a single game is hard. Making 50 seems near impossible. Add on top of that multiple creators and designers and self-imposed limitations to keep with the whole spirit of the project, and you’ve got quite the task on hand.

So for UFO50 to not only have delivered, but for it to deliver and be, by all accounts, VERY GOOD, is incredible.

Which is why I wanted to sit down and talk with Jon on Game Data to figure out how they got it done. Enjoy!

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