"The fact that you're implementing game system mechanics that cater to the South Park franchise, in the sense of rude and obnoxious different weapon types," Avellone explained, "we rarely get a chance to flex our design skills in those directions, and it's a lot of fun to do. We're actually learning a lot while we're doing it. That's another advantage of working on someone else's franchise. You sort of get inside their head for a sense of how they think, and how that stuff can be converted into game mechanics."

Obsidian was dropped into South Park with a surprisingly clear vision of what to do, as a concept had already been proposed. "We didn't actually know what they were thinking about in terms of RPGs, so we went up there for one day, they ran us this animatic sequence of how they imagined the opening of the game playing," and Obsidian "got it" immediately. "It was hilarious, and we got it, we see what you're trying to make here. It's going to feel like the show, it's going to look like the show. Here's how you interpret the controller mechanisms."

What wasn't as clear from the outset was whether the Stick of Truth offer was true. "I would never have thought we'd get a chance to do an RPG like that, and like holy crap," Avellone said. "When we first heard about it, I seriously thought some other game company was punking us. 'Ha ha ha, we're from South Park and we want to do an RPG!... ha ha, fake.'"

Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, Johannes, Anders, Martin, Poi and the Coilworks team discuss going Greenlight and modern-retro challenges with Cloudbuilt.