Dust: Elysian Tail melds the beat 'em up with the platformer

 Dust: Elysian Tail is a great-looking new indie game, made for Microsoft's XNA Dream Build competition. A trailer came out for this week -- check it out below. 

The graphics feature smooth, bright animation. It should come as a no surprise that man behind this project comes from a background in animation. That's right. It's just mostly one guy who is making this game.

"I'm handling the programming, writing, artwork, and sound effects/voices," says the creator, a guy named Dean. In fact, before this year, this indie developer had hardly any coding experience. You would never guess, judging by how great the game looks after only about 7 months. "I mainly come from an animation background, and have been working on a indie feature film for the last 8 years," Dean said in the XNA forums. "I did a little bit of coding when I was 10 or so on an old TI-994A computer, but hadn't touched code since.  I'm basically making the game look as if someone took my film, and locked a camera out to the side."

As far as gameplay mechanics go, Dust: Elysian Tail plays like a cross between a simple beat'em up, and a platformer. This game just looks like 'win' all over. 

The creative concept for the title are based on a movie made by ... you guessed it, Dean Dodrill, same Dean working on the game. He's writing and directing this animated flick called Elysian Tail, and you can check out the website here.  

No word on when this might be finished, but Dean recently posted a build to XNA's playtest area for semi-public consumption, so the game is coming along quick.