Bushnell has been out of the game making business for quite awhile, but he's coming back with Battleswarm, an online PC game that allows players to switch between the roles of strategic commander and front line fighter, much like S2 Games' Savage. Instead of having different roles on the same team, however, one side plays the RTS-controlled alien bugs, while the other team is tasked with their extermination in first-person format.

The inspiration for the genre-mixing title comes from wanting to play games with his five sons.

They're all avid gamers and like first-person shooters. The problem is, as you get older, you lose some reaction time, and as a result, I'm getting slaughtered by them. A real-time strategy [RTS] game, however, is more my [preference], a good resource game is what I love. Battleswarm is both an RTS and a shooter, a mash-up between StarCraft and Starship Troopers, if you will. You can switch sides, too, if you feel like an RTS instead of a shooter, or vice-versa.

It actually sounds like an interesting solution to bridging the age gap, giving those of us slowly losing our reflexes a fighting chance against our young nephews...or whatever. Not that I am losing my edge or anything. It's just that kids these days can see forever, and might have psychic powers.

'Father of electronic games' on his next project, the state of the industry [USA Today]

Weir takes a reasonably detailed look at how designers successfully married RPG and match 3 elements, and why Puzzle Quest is the best example of a well deployed hybrid design. He offers the following words for designers:

When creating genre-spanning games, developers should follow Puzzle Quest's example. They should choose genres that can interact well with each other, and look at places where the tropes of one genre can be exploited, as with Puzzle Quest's use of puzzle gameplay as a battle system.

Additionally, developers should not fall into the trap of believing that the novelty of genre fusion will make players forgive a shoddy implementation of the individual genres. An FPS/RPG hybrid need not be the best FPS or the best RPG, but it should present each genre in a way that it could at least hold its own against single-genre games. Combining shoddy implementations of two genres does not lead to a single good game, but a sort of shambling Frankenstein's monster. Puzzle Quest, on the other hand, is a true hybrid, taking two well-executed genre games and combining them into an even better whole.

Anyways, nice quick read on a nice game — Weir has some interesting points on the implementation of various design elements.

'The Interactive Palette' - Puzzle Quest and the Best of Both Worlds [GameSetWatch]