Here's some good news for those in Europe who want to meet a game developer. Martin Hollis, the owner and founder of Cambridge-based game development studio Zoonami Ltd, will be appearing at Gamestation Cambridge on Saturday, June 9, along with members of the Zendoku development team.

Hollis and his team will be there from 2 P.M. until 4 P.M. to talk about game development in general and Zendoku in particular. Zendoku is Zoonami's puzzle title for the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP handheld systems. It was released in the UK/Europe on April 20 and is slated for a U.S. release today.

During the event, Hollis will answer questions about game development, so those of you who want to learn some things straight from the pros should try and drop by. Gamers can also bring their DS and PSP units to the event and challenge one of the members of the Zendoku dev team to some head-to-head Zendoku battles.

Zendoku for the PlayStation Portable (PSP) and Nintendo DS (DS), simply put, is a logic-based puzzle game Sudoku with a karate twist. It's not hard at all to understand but what's curious is the idea behind this game. Gaming site Pocket Gamer recently sat down with game developer Martin Hollis to find out once and for all.

Hollis, at the beginning of the interview, jokingly mentioned that Sudoku needs ninjas and that's all the explanation the fans will ever need. And then he commented that it is Zoonami Ltd.'s priority to come up with good and unique video games. He admitted that there were a lot of bumps along the way and the title wasn't really intended for the handhelds. Hollis remarked,

We've made a large number of game prototypes on a variety of platforms and learned a lot along the way, but unfortunately struggled to find development deals that were right for us. With Zendoku, we didn't decide specifically to make a DS or a PSP game. The important thing for us is to make a good game and choose the right platform for it.

And we believe that it has all the potential to become a great game. Instead of numbers, players will be matching up colorful symbols in Zendoku. Aside from the puzzle game, there are various characters available with his own unique graphics, themes and storylines.

"Every time you complete a row, column, or 3x3 box on the sudoku grid, you launch an attack on your opponent. You also launch an attack when you fill in all nine of one symbol," Martin Hollis explains. Speaking of attacks, take note that these can be blocked provided that your character's lucky symbol is quickly placed on the grid.

Aside from the head-to-head combat, there is also a single player mode where everything is the same except the your opponent now is time. Accordingly, placing the lucky symbols on the grid will stop the clock momentarily. Even though Zendoku wasn't originally planned for the handhelds, Martin Hollis believes that it is a match made in heaven,

Zendoku is perfect for DS because it's a vibrant, colourful, fun Nintendo-style game. The sudoku gameplay is perfect for the stylus and the attacks are more fun on the DS with a stylus than without. Equally, we feel PSP definitely needs more fun, casual games that are pick-up-and-play, so we've developed another version of Zendoku especially for it.