First, for people who may not be aware of Psyonix, what can you tell us about the company and its history with Epic?

We have been working with Epic since Unreal Tournament 2004. We first developed a mod that enabled the integration of vehicles into Unreal Tournament 2003. Thereafter Epic hired us to integrate that specific feature into the Onslaught game mode for UT 2004. We have actually been working with the Unreal Engine since the original Unreal Tournament. And since then, we have been a Unreal Engine-focused developer having contributed to more than a dozen titles that have utilized UE in the past five years, including Gears of War, UT3 and our own self-published title, Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars (PSN). And as a matter of fact (insert shameless plug), the game just celebrated its first birthday where we temporarily slashed the price across NTSC regions from $9.99 to $4.99 for two weeks. And starting today we are running this same promotion across PAL territories for through November 19.

Why do you believe Epic has had such a success with licensing Unreal Engine 3 to third party developers like yourself?

The development tools found in Epic's Unreal Engine 3 (UE3) are the ultimate keys to its success. These tools make rapid prototyping possible, and makes adding characters, animations, effects and level editing really easy for us which, in turn, reduces the time it takes to implement an idea.
How did Psyonix become involved with Epic in making a free game via the Unreal Development Kit?

When we first started using UE3 we created "Kismonday." On mondays (surprise), we would each make our own mini-game using only kismet and the level editor. The soccer element of Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars was actually a product of Kismonday. One weekend, several months back, a few of us decided --inKismonday spirit-- that we would try making a fully playable game in 2 days time. So in a single weekend we were able to make a nice looking and working side scrolling motocross game. With 3 or 4 days of solid work, we think that it could have passed for a finished title. Mark at Epic loved the rapid prototyping idea and asked us if we could make a demo game for the UDK. We love a challenge and from it wound up creating Whizzle.

How did the idea for Whizzle come about?

We knew we wanted to make a more casual 2-D side scrolling game that gamers of all ages and walks of life could enjoy, and we tried out a bunch of ideas. Eventually we ended up with a game that had a ball bouncing around that the player could control...the next step was to come up with ideas about how to make it fun and cool. So we had our concept artist come up with a character that with a spherical shape: Whizzle was born! From that point, we added some polish, a mystical underwater environment, jellyfish to bounce off of and the whole game just sort of came together.