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People can be split into two distinct groups; those who have played Samorost 2, and those who haven’t. If you’re a member of the latter, visit www.samorost2.net right this minute to be wowed by an enchanting adventure that features galactic space travel, dog kidnap and couch potato aliens. Its creator, Czech-born game designer and animator Jakub Dvorsky, will be joining us in Bradford this year as part of BAF Game, the festival’s splinter strand that explores the blurry crossovers between the worlds of games and animation. Before Jakub takes the trip to England, BAF caught up with him over email and asked him to divulge a little more about his fantastic work...

Jakub: It was Film and Television Graphic Design Studio at The Academy of Art, Architecture and Design in Prague. Professor at that studio was famous Czech director and animator Jiri Barta (The Pied Piper, The Lost World of Mittens, etc).

Reactions were inconsistent - older teachers were confused because of an interactivity. Dissertations in our department are usually short animated films, so I was the first who created an interactive project. Younger ones were wondering how is it done and mostly liked it. Finally I got a B.

We are a team of people which grows bigger with each new project. I started alone as a designer, animator and programmer, then I needed sounds and music so I invited two more guys to help (Tomas Dvorak aka Pif and Tomas Dvorak aka Floex), then Vaclav Blin joined Amanita Design (he is also an animator and designer) and now we are working in an even bigger team with a good programmer, one more graphic artist and one more animator. All of us work at home so we are communicating mainly over the Internet.

First we need some ideas so we think about the game and story and draw sketches, then we create backdrops which we import into Flash where we create animations, interactivity and add music and sounds.

It depends on each project. Often we use a collage technique: first we take a lot of photos (roots, mosses or different things) with a digital camera. The next stage is cutting, joining and retouching the photos to create final backdrops within Photoshop.

First we need many small simple ideas which we put together to the whole puzzle. It's a lot of sketching, thinking, erasing and sketching again.

Thanks :) We are proud of these awards but it has not had a very big effect on us. However, it improved our position among indie game developers and our reputation which could be handy when we will be dealing with some potential publishers of our next games.

There are really many films and books that influenced me so just a few names: Bretislav Pojar, Karel Zeman, Terry Gilliam, Nick Park, Yuriy Norshteyn, Douglas Adams, J.R.R.Tolkien, Stanislaw Lem etc.

I used to play games - mostly adventure games (Day of the Tentacle, Gobliins, Discworld, Little Big Adventure, Neverhood, Myst) and also strategy games like Ci