Steph Thirion is an excellent game designer who I've had the good fortune to meet a few times. He first released a great game called Eliss on the App Store and he's now announced the second game he's been working on, called Faraway. Eliss was a terrific little arcade game that made great use of the iPhone's touchscreen, and Thirion says that while his first game dealt with "planets and space management in sectors, Faraway will be about constellations and infinite space travel." Sounds exciting. The game will be playable at GDC this week, so I'll definitely make time to run by and check it out.

Thirion has also announced a new company to represent and sell his iPhone games, and he's calling it LITTLE--EYES. It's really great to see a very smart, independent developer come into his own like on a platform like the iPhone -- there's really no other mainstream gaming platform out there that lets developers really jump in headfirst and release experimental games like these to a a mainstream market. We'll keep an eye out at GDC this week for all kinds of indie developers making it big. While it's cool that Valve and other larger companies are finally coming around, we have to be sure not to forget developers like this either.