The first Xbox Live Arcade game from Frozen Codebase, Screwjumper, is all about explosions and moving fast. Following the exploits of rogue mine workers, the game has players diving into an open mine shaft and causing as much destruction as possible, mostly by throwing dynamite and running head-first into obstacles.

If players do enough damage during their descent, as indicated by a bar on the right side of the screen, they detonate the mine's core when they get to the bottom. If they fail, their in-game avatars are gassed to death. Assuming they are successful, they are then rocketed through the shaft at a frantic pace, forced to outmaneuver obstacles and the tailing explosion in a race for survival.

To learn more about Frozen Codebase and Screwjumper, which is due out on Xbox Live Arcade in November and on GarageGame's InstantAction.com at some point, I spoke with producer Ben Geisler and the energetic design director Norb Rozek.

Shack: I have to ask how the name of Screwjumper came about.

Norb Rozek: Do you want the long story?

Shack: Sure.

Norb Rozek: Okay, this dates back to the paleolithic era.

Ben Geisler: Also known as 2005.

Norb Rozek: I believe I was a student, I think I was a student of Ben's, and I was working with the Torque Game Engine and I had homework. The homework was to import a model with an animation into the Torque Game Engine, which at that point and time in my life was like brain surgery. So I'm working on this brain surgery thing, I'm trying to import a model with an animation into Torque and I go into [3D Studio] Max and they have those architectural shapes.

I made one of those quick spiral staircases shapes, which was kinda cool, and I put a simple animation on it, which was just a big rotating thing. I don't know if you've ever exported a lot of stuff out of Max from Torque, but the scales are horribly screwed up. Intead of this thing being ten feet tall, like it was supposed to be when I imported it, it was this gigantic thousand foot tall spinning staircase. In the middle of this, it was just like this this gigantic Torque screw of the gods.

I was like, "oh my my goodness, this gigantic Torque screw of the gods has humbled me." If you had a spinning thing, and you had a guy jumping on this thing, you could call it Screwjumper because it kinda looks like a screw and he'd be jumping down these things. Eventually, the screws left and there's just the jumping.

Ben Geisler: But hey, they're mine workers, so they use screws to fasten things.

Norb Rozek: Or something like that. But anyways, this idea was in the back of my head, I never actually made the game. We were actually going to launch this company with a completely different game idea, but then we had everybody that we know tell us that we were on crack for thinking of this idea, so we said "wow, gosh darn, we better get a different idea." I was like, "I have this idea called Screwjumper," and everybody said "alright, let's do that." Thus was born this weird figure of darkness, this avenger of evil, the Screwjumper.

Ben Geisler: At the time, we had three concepts that we really liked and Screwjumper ended up being the one that emerged. Kinda when Wideload Games talked at IndieGamesCon (IGC), where you try a bunch of different things and whichever one sticks you go with, that's the phase we were going through, same kind of model they were using.

Shack: How long have you been developing Screwjumper?

Ben Geisler: Ten years [laughter]. It's very hard to answer that question because we were theoretically done with production in July, we started in, if you don't count the time of us fooling around, we started probably in August. Realistically, it's about an 11 month timeframe. However, there was also certification kickbacks we had to deal with.

I had shipped Xbox games before and GameCube games and PS2 games, all of which had technical certification requirements, but Xbox Live Arcade has quite some hefty nuances, like invites and friends lists and private lists for multiplayer games versus public, that previous versions of Xbox never had. All that stuff, every once in a while we kept spending time on even after July, so when all is said and done, it was probably a 13 month project.

Shack: How long did you spend in certification?

Norb Rozek: Seems like about 17 years.

Ben Geisler: Our first submission was probably July and we just got certified a week ago. Mind you, a lot of this was not like Microsoft--they're actually really good in terms of giving pretty quick feedback, but we'd submit to THQ, they'd bang on it for a little while, we'd fix some stuff, come back. We do our own internal testing, one thing we really found was that we really had to ramp up our own internal testing because THQ had a certain amount of resources but we wanted to go beyond those resources in terms of testing.

I think first submission was end of July and final submission approval was middle of October, so three and a half months.

Shack: So when does Screwjumper release?

Ben Geisler: All I can say is that it is definitely going to be in November. I can't say the exact date because there is another title that THQ is trying to figure out if they're going to flop it with that one. They have two titles coming out, I can't say which the other one is, but they're deciding which one they're going to release first.

Shack: Would that other THQ game happen to be SpongeBob SquarePants: Underpants Slam?

Ben Geisler: I can neither confirm nor deny that allegation. Allegation, I say!

Shack: Within Screwjumper, the descent to the bottom of the shaft is in third person, whereas the race back up is in first-person. Why is that?

Norb Rozek: That actually wasn't an idea, that was just a functional thing because people were finding it very difficult to direct that guy back up the shaft in third person, I'm not sure why that was. Time and time again, when we had people test it, they just couldn't do it third person.

Ben Geisler: It was just an iteration during design. It just wasn't fun, frankly, [in] third person, we were like, "forget it, let's make it like Descent." You know, Descent was first person, you're going through tunnels very similar to that. That was kinda the mantra for ascent mode, make it sort of an homage to Descent. Kinda ironic that ascent mode is an homage to Descent, but whatever, that was unintentional.

You go faster in ascent mode, so it's hard to figure out, based on the camera angle, which direction you should move your Screwjumper. You've seen it played, right?

Shack: Yeah, I saw Norb almost beat endurance mode at IGC.

Norb Rozek: Yes, that is correct. I could have beaten it on a better day.

Ben Geisler: We have two people at our office that have beat endurance mode--

Norb Rozek: Three, we have three.

Ben Geisler: I'm personally against the whole hardcore idea, that 'play better' sort of thing. But this mode, since it's optional, I'm cool with it. It's kinda like a nod to old-school arcade games that were quite difficult, where you had to be really awesome to get through these levels. That's what endurance mode is supposed to be. If you think the game is too easy, then play endurance mode and try to get through it [with a set amount of lives].

Shack: How does multiplayer work?

Ben Geisler: Basically, it's a race to the bottom and then back up and you get ranked. There's four people total that can play. You still have to blow up the shaft, in other words whoever gets to the bottom first gets the chance to blow it up. Unlike destruction mode, you don't have to destroy a certain percentage of pieces of mining equipment on the way down, you just essentially get to blow up the shaft, that's your reward for getting to the bottom first.

Norb Rozek: Multiplayer is essentially a race where you're trying to use your jet boots as much as you can without blowing up, but then you're also trying to hit stuff strategically to get your health back so you can keep your jet boots going, and you also want to blow up stuff that is ahead of you just to stop your opponents from being able to go through it and thereby increase their health and get their jet boots going. So yes, it's a race, in short.

Turn the page for more on Frozen Codebase, the games it has in development, and the company's views of the independet development scene.