Maybe it's just me, but it feels like there's an abundance of stealth-based games going around at the moment. Monaco, SpyParty, Mark of the Ninja, Deus Ex, Stealth Bastard... ducking and dodging definitely appears to be "in" right now. Thomas Was Alone creator Mike Bithell added to that list earlier today, when he announced Volume, a stealth game that's focused around sound and distractions, and the ability for players to easily create their own levels and share them with other players. And Bithell is well aware of the surge of stealth games going around. "In Monaco's case, I've banned myself from playing it," he tells me. "I'm scared it'd be too big an influence. There's definitely an element of replication to stealth mechanics, especially environmental interactions." In Volume, for example, you can walk on noisy floors that will attract enemy attention, then proceed to hide in a locker, or just generally take cover. "That's a genre expectation, and I felt that was needed," he says. But Bithell isn't worried about entering a genre currently brimming with titles, as he notes that a stealth game felt like a natural progression for his work after Thomas Was Alone. "What are stealth games, if not puzzle games with heightened risk and the feel of an action game?" he adds. "I wonder if indies see it as similar to the popular puzzle platformer genre - a cool existing framework to subvert, or add a cool twist to. That's definitely how I view it."

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As mentioned previously, Volume is a game all about using sound to your advantage (and disadvantage). "The game's treatment of sound, and AI's reactions to it, is where things get interested," Bithell says. "It's a crowd control game, so you use noises to interrupt enemy actions and change things to your liking." "I can do that because of the stylized nature of the game," he adds. "The fact that the player can see sound ranges means they become as important a tool as eagle vision in Assassin's Creed, or shadows in Splinter Cell. That's where the game becomes its own thing, and offers its own specific challenge." You can't kill anyone in Volume -- it's not that sort of stealth game. The focus is well and truly on staying hidden, and sneaking past without a Plan B. "The best you can do is stun them for a few seconds, and when they wake up, they'll be suitably agitated," he explains. "This pushes the focus from room clearing to true evasion. You never have the upper hand, and it becomes a very fast crowd control game. The puzzle becomes one of disruption, which was always the stuff I enjoyed most in stealth games." When I talked to Andy Schatz about stealth in Monaco last year, he named player choices as one of the most intriguing elements of the stealth genre. For Bithell, it's communicating AI states to the player for that they can better make these choices. "I want to see exactly what they're thinking, I want to know what they can see," he reasons. "I played Metal Gear Solid through the little soliton radar in the bottom of the screen, and I wanted to scale up that situational awareness to the whole screen - that's why vision cones were always going to be so prominent." "I want to feel clever, and make informed choices while playing," he adds. "To do that, it all comes down to the information I'm being made aware of."