Pocket God creator Dave Castelnuovo on what he hopes from Atari's Pong Indie Developer Challenge

Time is counting down to Atari's Pong Indie Developer Challenge - deadline 15 April.

So the company is rolling out some of the big names who will be judging the competition that will see the winner gain $100,000 and a revenue share publishing deal - to encourage teams to complete their projects.

One such is Pocket God co-creator Dave Castelnuovo, who's happy to hand out advice.

Dave Castelnuovo: Go with your gut. Don't try to build something that you think people will expect to see, build something that you want to play. Build the game that you NEED to play that no one has built yet.

It's important that your personality and your unique sensibilities come through in your design.

A good game needs to connect to the people that play it and it's really hard to make something that resonates with other people unless you make something that resonates with you first.

I hope to see something unexpected. I can probably jot down 10 different takes on Pong that cover all the expected directions that one could go in. I hope to see something different than that, something refreshing.

The Sega coin-op version of Tetris as well as the new Tetris game are great examples of refreshing takes on a classic.

Pretty early on - I used to have Battle Zone on my Atari 2600 and I would play with the plug and try to short the cartridge in order to cause a bug in the game that would make me invincible.

I also tried to write a text-based adventure game on the TRS-80 when I was in 6th grade and always had a feeling that there were game ideas that I wanted to realise.

This is a really hard question. Since the indie explosion of the past couple of years, the game industry has become very much like the music industry where there are tons of genres and subgenres.

I don't really see games going in a single direction anymore.

In the past you could point to periods where shooters were popular or when RPGs made a comeback. Now I think developers have the flexibility to pick the genre they have the most passion for and not worry so much about what everyone else is doing.

Look at Tim Schafer and Double Fine - they are a great example of a developer that is choosing to make point-and-click games again. In the App Store you see a huge variety of games, monetisation methods, and art styles. I think this expansion is going to continue.

This is another difficult question, there are so many games that I enjoy playing. Almost everything from Nintendo to my old Atari 2600 games (Yars Revenge anyone?), to Sonic, to Ultima, a large list of JRPGs, fighting games such as Virtua Fighter and Soul Caliber, anything that Jeff Minter does (Tempest 2000).

But to actually relate to a character is tough… maybe Laharl from Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. He's kind of demented and evil, and I imagine he could probably come up with some pretty cool updates for Pocket God.

You can find out more details about the Atari's Pong Indie Developer Challenge via its website.