Parallax is a creation of two people, and the trailer for the 2012 Independent Game Festival made an impression on gamers when it was released last week. The trailer looks interesting, with a strong monochromatic color scheme and a fascinating take on some of the ideas popularized by Portal.

We got in touch with the game's creators, Zi Ye and Jesse Burstyn, to talk about the ideas behind the game, and learn just how soon we'll be able to play for ourselves.

"The core concept behind Parallax is the existence of two overlapping dimensions. The goal in each level is to reach an exit. There are interdimensional rifts placed throughout the level which allow the player to look and travel seamlessly between the dimensions," the team explained to us when we asked what was going on in that video. Admittedly, that explanation may not have helped as much as they would have liked.

"You can think of each level as a kind of maze, where the paths in the maze run through both dimensions and can overlap. To make things even more interesting, the player has the ability to configure the paths by flipping the interdimensional rifts," Burstyn said. Maybe you should just watch the video for yourself.

They've been working on the game since February of this year, and expect to be finished by the end of the year, which seems to be an incredibly ambitious schedule for a game made in the spare time of two people. The game is currently in beta, and they're aiming for a PC and Mac release, although they're not ruling out iOS or even console releases.

Of course, with a game this weird, the design doesn't come easily. "One of the first challenges we hit was creating the technology to allow the player to look and travel seamlessly between two dimensions with overlapping geometry," they explained.

After a series of failed experiments, they finally found a way that's both efficient and flexible. This is a common theme with independent games that end up being successful: the tools used to create the game need to be easy to use and allow for constant iteration through the design process. "Another challenge has been the design of the levels themselves," Ye said. "We did not foresee just how difficult it would be to create puzzles which span multiple dimensions. If a puzzle was to be difficult to solve, it was much more difficult to design."

At one point the game featured more realistic shaders, and they played with a few different color schemes, but the black and white graphics worked well to show the difference between the two dimensions, and offer a way to communicate the shift between them both instantly and clearly. It's a striking, bold look, and fits the game's play brilliantly.

We'll be keeping up with the game's progress, and plan a full review when it's released. The best thing a trailer can do is get you excited about playing the game, and the IGF trailer did exactly that. We wish Toasty Games the best.