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All right... if anyone could have thought of offering some makeup for that shiny nose of mine? ;D Great questions Tom, enjoyed every second! Thanks! Now everyone please rush off and buy SteamWorld Dig if you haven't yet.

@JJtheTexan I think you nailed most of what we want to see in the sequel - WHEN we make it! Longer, more backstory... and more bosses, perhaps?

@ThomasBW84 great Tom - thanks!

Thanks for chatting face to face yesterday, Tom - and for the speedy publishing of this news item! Actually the headline is a tad misleading: it should read "...in SteamWorld series" and not "...in SteamWorld Dig series"... Small bit big difference, the next SteamWorld game will be a bit different from Dig.
@Player4: first name is pronounced "Briaoudn" - of course! ;D

Thanks for all the kind words! You are all hereby bona-fide ImageFormers!

@Fast_45er Well, both SteamWorld Dig and "The good, the bad & the ugly" are in a Western setting. I think you'll find a lot of similarities when digging through movie/game titles that go Western. But it's interesting, we've heard about "Ecstasy of Gold" specifically a couple of times now. And obviously Morricone is an inspiration when you want to create desolate-feeling Western themes, and IMO we're not bordering on stealing... Early on I also wanted a bit of Ry Cooder's "Paris, Texas" ambience in there - a brilliant soundscape - but we decided to go more towards spaghetti.

Wow! Yes, it really came out of nowhere - to YOU GUYS! We've been buried in it for so many months, that we didn't really have time to come up with promo material during the dev process. We apologize for the surprise element. Please continue evangelizing the game, to friends, in forums, everywhere! With our laughable PR/marketing budget, you'd do us a HUGE favor in helping SteamWorld Dig climb the eShop download charts. <3

@Klinny That's the spirit! What about the rest of the family? Mom? Dad? Grandma? ;D

@Stargazer I don't think so; the music in SteamWorld Dig was written by the excellent Mattias Hammarin (in-game music) and Jonas Kjellberg (main theme). @DarkCoolEdge While I'm name-dropping: although he didn't produce everything alone, the graphics are the brainchildren of our amazing art director Tobias Nilsson. He is also the reason why our magnificent iOS hit Anthill (4.89 out of 5 from >30K user reviews) looks so good.

@WinterWarm Of course - always room for one more bottom in the Champagne Hot Tub! Everyone, reach out to everyone you know, and we'll have a sequel.

Dear Mr Whitehead of Nintendo Life,
We hereby cordially invite you to share the (not so but still) luxurious SteamWorld Dig Celebrity Rave Review Champagne Hot Tub that we have installed at our premises in Gothenburg, Sweden. Please note that you may feel slightly cramped as you now step in, as you are accompanied by such noted guests as PocketGamer, HardcoreGamer, USGamer, Nintendo World Report, 4Players.de, Cubed3, BitSize Reviews, Gamesblip, VGNetwork.it, PureNintendo and many other dignitaries plus more to come - but as the saying goes: if there is room in the heart, there is always room for more bottoms. (I can assure you that this actually sounds a lot better in Swedish.)

Thanks for this page, NintendoLife! Everyone, did you see? 10 out of 10 in PocketGamer for SteamWorld Dig: "This isn't simply the best Nintendo 3DS game you've played - it's one of the best games you'll play this year." Awesomesauce!!
http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/3DS/SteamWorld+Dig/review.asp?c=52943

@DarkCoolEdge: the first review is in, and a small Australian outfit beat everyone to it (at least she's the first to notify us): http://gamesblip.com/review-STEAMWORLDDIG.htm

It's drop-dead gorgeous, folks. Thomas W: you're the most beautiful man alive, and we love you to bits. Thanks!

Things are heating up! Rusty, Dorothy and the rest are hitting the eShop on August 8 in the US, Europe and Australia on August 8! For once, Japan will have to wait a few weeks.

@ultraraichu Thanks for asking, and I apologize in advance for the self-righteousness that follows.
At Image & Form we're only interested in making quality games, and we think you can't make a game that fits all platforms perfectly. Rather than making so-so ports to all thinkable platforms, it's much more constructive to decide early how the game will work, and then select the platform(s) from there. We made Anthill for iOS and Android because the touch screens were perfect for it. We've made SteamWorld Dig for the 3DS because (a) the controls and (b) the portability of the 3DS are perfect for SteamWorld Dig:
(a) a mobile version of SWD isn't realistic - I have yet to see a really functional on-screen D-pad for a mobile game,
(b) SWD is a deep game. It takes a long while to play through, and you will want to play a bit at a time.

One of the unique features of the Wii U - maybe the most important one - is the mix/match setup of the gamepad, Wiimotes and the TV. The big question is: how do you create a game that makes the most of that setup? Immediately you get ideas about asymmetric multiplayer gameplay, where one (main) player uses the gamepad to battle other (Wiimote) players. But it must also be fun to play alone, so the game must be able to substitute the Wiimote players with non-player (AI) characters. One interesting thing is that the main player can see things on the gamepad that the other players cannot see on the TV. So that's one challenge for us game developers, to come up with interesting game scenarios that arise from this perspective.

And as I've said before in other places, scarcity of game titles on a platform isn't necessarily a bad thing. The real problem is rather when a platform gets flooded with bad games, me-too games or both. I'll take quality before quantity on any day. Let's hope that the games that come to the Wii U are both interesting and unique, because the Wii U has its unique merits.

@SyFyTy: Thanks a lot for your wise and warming words! The time has definitely passed when you could hope to release a half-baked game. We are now realistically only a couple of days from total completion with SteamWorld Dig, and we have a wonderful feeling - not only is it going to be great, but the strong story and the genre mixing will make it a milestone game - a gamer's game. And it's packed - I'm not the very fastest gamer in town, but now I've played it through entirely from start to finish twice, and my fastest run is at just over eight hours, even though I by now know most of the secret areas and caves by heart. I hope you'll all enjoy it when we release. If all goes well with the Nintendo lotcheck process, SteamWorld Dig hits the eShop on August 8, 2013.

We now have an official release date! Looks like you'll have to wait through the first part of the summer, but who'd like to spend the best months of the year underground anyway? STEAMWORLD DIG WILL BE AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE ON AUGUST 8, 2013.

@JenJacobsen, put away those knives. SteamWorld Dig is definitely coming to Australia.

@Fusion14: Fez is a great game, and the developer said a few really silly things in the aftermath. It was all very strange...
@RikuzeYre and all of you: I should have also said that we do a lot of posting at http://www.facebook.com/steamworlddig - check it out and like (if you like)!

Oh, of course! It's @imageform!

Thanks a lot again, all of you! Obviously the best way to stay tuned to what happens with SteamWorld Dig on a day-to-day basis, is to visit and like at facebook.com/steamworlddig - we try to put up new stuff there every day.

Thanks a lot for all the love, and please pass the word around! @Idork99: Thanks for asking about Mariachi Hero, so we can be done with it: the graphics were cartoonish and therefore stereotypical, in a non-demeaning way. If we offended anyone, we apologize on our bare knees. But I think it was grotesquely misunderstood: if the game had been set in France, the hero would have waved a baguette and worn a black beret, and had he been German he would have worn lederhosen and one of those cool, small felt hats. (And we'd love to use Swedes in our games in the same way, but we Swedes are quite bland - no cool traits. Meatballs?) Typical but harmless exaggeration, which got twisted in a review. Since we use a cartoonish style we use the graphic attributes we can think of to distinguish our characters, but we would never dream of being superior to our game characters, or use our games to berate people of any nationality or group. We love and respect all, and work to serve all. And heck, do I get wordy.

Thanks for the sweet comments! Of course we're eager to listen to you guys - so please post here what press material you're hoping to see next, or what you hope to see in SteamWorld Dig. There's also an official SteamWorld Dig thread in the 3DS forum here on Nintendo Life. Check it out!

@beat: here it is! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmILgleMlYI

@Dpishere: you can find a link to a quite raw gameplay beta video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZmILgleMlYI#!

@beat and @Cyb3rnite: yep, it sure does. We're drawing all our graphics in vector format, so that we can use it for more hi-res purposes - posters, gorgeous screenshots and what have you - and then we scale down for the 3DS. Still looks fabulous on the 3DS though, and the gameplay is coming along nicely. We just recorded an early beta gameplay video - I'll post a video link in a separate post here!