In less than a month, 1,000 of you will swarm on a recently-restored landmark high school in SE Portland for this year’s XOXO. The most exciting part? We’ve announced less than 20% of what we’re planning this year.

That changes right now as we kick off a full week of announcements for our evening festival programming.

First up: XOXO Arcade , held on Friday, September 11, from 7pm-1am at Yale Union.

Every year, we bring some of the most interesting indie games to XOXO, projecting their games huge onto the walls of the YU.

This year, we have our biggest lineup yet: 12 of the most interesting, unreleased, eagerly-anticipated indie games we could find, with each of their designers and developers on hand to show them off.

Donut County

In the whimsical Donut County, you play a hole in the ground, growing a little bigger every time you swallow objects in the world around you. Ben Esposito, the game’s creator and Glitch City co-founder, joins us from Los Angeles, the city that inspired the game’s surrealist setting.

Tacoma

The new game from the creators of Gone Home, Tacoma is a story exploration game that takes place on an empty space station 200,000 miles from Earth, where you piece together what happened to the crew through augmented reality logs. Fullbright co-founders Karla Zimonja and Steve Gaynor, along with the rest of the Portland-based team, will share a playable version of Tacoma for the first time ever.

GNOG

Explore a universe of boldly colorful giant monster heads in GNOG, each one part of an interconnected world filled with machinery and secrets. KO-OP Mode’s Saleem Dabbous and Bronson Zgeb join us from Montréal.

Wattam

Reunite the characters of an exploded world and make new friends in Wattam, the latest creation from the mind of Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi. We’re thrilled to have Funomena co-founder Martin Middleton, previously of Flower and Journey, on hand to show it off.

Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

In Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, one person in virtual reality must defuse a time bomb with the help of their friends in the real world. Randomly changing every time, the time bomb can only be disarmed with paper manuals and teamwork. Developer Brian Fetter will join us from Ottawa.

Cibele

Nina Freeman’s vignette games draw inspiration from her own life, recounting sometimes-painful stories from her childhood and adolescence. Her upcoming game Cibele is a game about love, sex, and the Internet—meeting a boy through an MMO and the relationship that follows, with Nina and frequent collaborator Emmett Butler there to answer your questions.

Firewatch

Developed by Campo Santo and published by Portland’s own Panic, Firewatch is an eagerly-anticipated first-person adventure game set in the Wyoming wilderness, where your only emotional lifeline is the person on the other end of a handheld radio. Campo Santo’s Patrick Ewing will show off their latest progress.

Badblood

Winnie Song developed Badblood as her MFA thesis, working alone on her laptop for six months. That changed earlier this month when the teaser trailer exploded online and was instantly greenlit on Steam. With its unique illustration style and local split-screen gameplay, Badblood is hide and seek turned deadly. We’re very excited Winnie’s flying in from Brooklyn to join us at XOXO.

Circa Infinity

Circa Infinity is a mindbending circular platformer in which you descend into increasingly recursive circles across 50 levels, paired with a spare color scheme and heart-pounding soundtrack. Designer and developer Kenny Sun, a 22-year-old recent NYU graduate, joins us from NYC.

Overland

Overland is a stylish, minimalist survival game in which players guide a changing cast of characters across a post-apocalyptic America, described as “Oregon Trail meets The Road.” Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman has written about bootstrapping the game, and the challenges that came with it, and we’re thrilled to have it at XOXO, joined by L.A.-based artist and designer Heather Penn.

BELOW

The new game from the creators of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, BELOW is a beautifully minimalist top-down adventure borrowing from roguelikes, where you play a mysterious Wanderer fighting your way down to the Depths. Creative director Kris Piotrowski and soundtrack creator Jim Guthrie are coming from Toronto to join us at XOXO.

Hyper Light Drifter

Hyper Light Drifter is one of the most highly-anticipated indie games, funded by a blockbuster Kickstarter project that raised over $645k from 25,150 backers in 2013. The fast-paced 2D action RPG was inspired by SNES classics, and creator Alex Preston’s congenital heart condition. Heart Machine designer/developer Teddy Dief joins us from the Glitch City collective in Los Angeles.