When asked about developer Friend & Foe’s loose plans for releasing its two announced games, Vane and Dangerous Men, Thomas Lilja told IGN, “It’s not hard for us to answer the question. But it might be dangerous.”

“ We’ve had so many ideas about how to solve problems. Now it’s our turn to show that we can do it.

Lilja, along with colleagues Rasmus Deguchi and Ivar Dahlberg, speak about their games in the broadest of terms. It’s understandable. They’ve only been in business since May 2014, so there’s very little to show and talk about. Even still, the team promises a “nimble development” that’s quite unlike their past experiences.“As some of us have been working on The Last Guardian,” Deguchi told IGN, “none of us are interested in working on the same thing for too long.”Comprised of five AAA veterans, Friend & Foe is a new studio operating out of Tokyo, Japan, where its first game, Vane, is in early prototyping stage. The open-world exploration game sees a child, who wields an unknown power, discovering its place in the world.“The story’s not told in the traditional sense with cutscenes and NPCs telling you what’s going on,” Dahlberg said. “It’s told through the environments. What can you read between the lines? There are things to figure out.”When asked about the reasonability of creating an open-world single-player game, Deguchi, Lilja, and Dahlberg were all candid about player expectations, and what the team needs to do to execute."Being a small team doing an open-world game might seem ambitious, but we're looking to do our own take on it that serves the story of the game as well as the sense of freedom and exploration,” said Deguchi. “We’ve had so many ideas about how to solve it. Now it’s our turn to show that we can do it.”Dangerous Men is a different game entirely, focusing on action, explosions, and the sort of local co-op the team’s enjoyed from TowerFall and BroForce. It’s a lot to take on for such a small team. “Our initial plan was not to be crazy ambitious, but we kind of failed,” Lilja said. Friend & Foe aims to accomplish its goals by taking advantage of its team’s experience, and working within reasonable constraints. Both Vane and Dangerous Men are in parallel development, and will be handled “in a way where they don’t consume each other’s resources,” Deguchi said.Vane will be handled internally at Friend & Foe, while “a lot of good artists” the studio trusts will assist on Dangerous Men. “so we can get both of these things done in a reasonable time frame… We’re so tiny that we can’t afford to get snowed in.”The Friend & Foe guys keep coming back to the idea of making the games they want to make, doing them on their own terms, and getting it done quickly. ”Making games with simpler art styles means you can get more done in less time and have more creative control over it.”Everyone involved here has a clear desire to do something different than they’re used to. Lilja has “been making tanks and robot and s**t like that for 10 years. It doesn’t mean that’s the only thing I want to do. It comes to a point where, you just want to do something very different and challenging.”

Mitch Dyer is an associate editor at IGN. He's trying to read 50 books in 2014. These are the 50 . Talk to Mitch about books and other stuff on Twitter at @MitchyD and subscribe to MitchyD on Twitch