IGF blog

IGF China seeking pan-Pacific indie game submissions for 2013 event

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 17:16:51 +0000

The Independent Games Festival China - which will take place alongside this September's GDC China in Shanghai - has opened its call for submissions and is accepting indie game entries from the pan-Pacific area from now through July 19.

Following its success from previous years, GDC China will once again host all three main elements of IGF China, including the Indie Games Summit, the IGF Pavilion, and the prestigious IGF China Awards.

Now in its fifth year, the IGF Summit at GDC China will feature sessions from some of the world's top developers, while the IGF Pavilion will showcase some of the region's best independent and student games.

And of course the IGF China Awards - which are split into both Main and Student competitions - will honor the many talented developers in the pan-Pacific area.

Last year's event saw 159 high-quality entries from regions including Mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, India, Serbia, Montenegro, and more.

Last year's recipients included the Best Game winner, the retro-inspired puzzler Cubetractor, and abstract action Best Student Game winner, Fish - and other previously honored games (from 2011 and before) include acclaimed strategy title FTL: Faster Than Light and unconventional retro game Pixel May Cry.

The 2013 IGF China Main Competition will give out awards and cash prizes in five categories, including:

- Best Game (RMB20,000 ~ $3,150 USD)
- Best Mobile Game (RMB5,000 ~ $780 USD)
- Excellence in Audio (RMB5,000 ~ $780 USD)
- Excellence in Technology (RMB5,000 ~ $780 USD)
- Excellence in Visual Arts (RMB5,000 ~ $780 USD)

The Student Competition, meanwhile, will offer two awards, for Best Student Game (RMB10, 000 ~ $1,570 USD, 1 Winner) and Excellent Student Winner (RMB3, 000 ~$470 USD, 2 Winners).

Finalists -- who will receive two All Access passes to attend GDC China and the IGF awards ceremony -- will be chosen by a panel of expert jurors including Kevin Li (CEO, TipCat Interactive); Monte Singman (Founder/CEO, Radiance Digital Entertainment); Xubo Yang (Director of Digital Art Lab and Assistant Professor; Shanghai Jiaotong University's School of Software), Haipeng Yu (Producer, Tencent Shanghai), and jury chairman Simon Carless, IGF Chairman Emeritus and EVP of the GDC shows and Gamasutra.

The key dates for IGF China include:

- July 19, 2013- Submission Deadline
- August 15, 2013- Finalists Announced
- September 15-17, 2013 - Game Developers Conference China 2013
- September 15, 2013 - IGF China Awards Ceremony (Winners Announced!)
- September 15-17, 2013 - IGF China Pavilion @ GDC China

For more details on the show, please visit GDC China's official website or the information and submission pages for IGF China.

IGF 2013 winners led by Cart Life and FTL: Faster Than Light

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 03:30:00 +0000

Cart Life, Richard Hofmeier's realistic, sometimes heart-breaking game about food cart workers trying to achieve their dreams, earned the Seumas McNally Award for Best Independent Game and its associated $30,000 cash prize this evening at the 15th Annual Independent Games Festival, hosted by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

In addition to winning the Grand Prize, Cart Life also won the Best Narrative Award and the Nuovo Award for abstract and unconventional games, an impressive sweep for a sometimes deliberately obtuse title that was relatively underappreciated before the IGF Awards season.

The other IGF multi-award winner for the evening was acclaimed space strategy title FTL: Faster Than Light by Subset Games. FTL was helped to prominence by an IGF China nomination early in its development and was honored with both the Excellence in Design Award and the Audience Award.

Other IGF award recipients for 2013 include Tomorrow Corporation's quirky title about burning objects in an 'entertainment fireplace,' Little Inferno, which won the Technical Excellence Award. Surreal magical realist adventure game Kentucky Route Zero by Cardboard Computer won the Excellence in Visual Art award for its beautifully designed environments, and Jeppe Carlsen's beat-based platformer 140 won the Excellence in Audio Award.

Finally, the Best Student Game was awarded to the third-person, high-speed skating game that celebrates Twitter and cell phone culture, Zineth, by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, picked from another strong set of student game finalists.

All finalists and winners for this year's competition are playable at the Game Developers Conference at the IGF Pavilion on the GDC Expo Floor in San Francisco's Moscone Center through Friday, March 29.

The IGF awarded the following games as winners of its 15th Annual Awards:

Excellence in Visual Art ($3,000)
Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)

Nuovo Award ($5,000)
Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier)

Excellence in Audio ($3,000)
140 (Jeppe Carlsen)

Excellence in Narrative ($3,000)
Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier)

Technical Excellence ($3,000)
Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation)

Best Student Game ($3,000)
Zineth (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

Audience Award ($3,000)
FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games)

Excellence in Design ($3,000)
FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games)

Seumas McNally Grand Prize ($30,000)
Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier)

The Independent Games Festival - which also included a two-day Independent Games Summit on Monday, March 25th and Tuesday, March 26th as part of GDC - was established in 1998 by the UBM Tech Game Network to encourage the rise of independent game development and to recognize the best independent game titles, in the same way that the Sundance Film Festival has honored the independent film community.

Organizers would like to thank this year's kind supporters of the IGF, including Microsoft Studios (Platinum Sponsor), Valve (Platform Sponsor), DigiPen Institute of Technology (Platinum Student Showcase Sponsor), and Le Cnam ENJMIN (Gold Student Showcase Sponsor).

The IGF offers finalists both global exposure and more than $50,000 in cash prizes to each year's winners, in addition to a guaranteed slot on Valve's Steam distribution service for Main Competition finalists and a one year subscription to the Microsoft Development Network for winners.

Your indie guide to IGF 2013: a GDC primer

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 22:46:20 +0000

The week-long 2013 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco's Moscone Center, which hosts both the Independent Games Festival and related Summit, begins Monday, March 25, and we're listing a thorough indie to-do list, highlighting some of the can't miss indie-related events happening every day.

The week begins with the two-day Indie Games Summit (Monday, March 25 and Tuesday, March 26), which is packed with sessions on some of the latest and greatest titles released. Attendees will want to build their own GDC schedule to avoid missing any of these talks.

Postmortems of several hit indie games will include the fake-science puzzler SpaceChem, spacecraft crew sim and RTS FTL: Faster Than Light, the stealth-redefining action game Mark of the Ninja, and the reverse shmup and rhythm hybrid Retro/Grade.

Other notable lectures include crowdfunding tips for indies, designing the mystery behind the episodic Kentucky Route Zero, and the game idea-spawning Twitter account PeterMolydeux and its corresponding Molyjam.

Finally, the ever-popular Indie Soapbox session returns, allowing several devs 5 minutes to rant about indie game development. The lineup includes: Renaud Bedard (FEZ), Bennett Foddy (QWOP), Chris Hecker (SpyParty), Rami Ismail (Super Crate Box), Noel Llopis (Casey's Contraptions), Tim Rogers (Ziggurat), David Rosen (Lugaru), Emily Short (Galatea), Rich Vreeland (FEZ OST), and Matthew Wegner (Aztez).

This is just a sample of the full line-up of talks lined up for the Indie Games Summit, spanning Monday and Tuesday - All-Access Pass, Summits/Tutorials, and IGS passholders can get in, and all sessions are being recorded for GDC Vault, with select talks available for free later in the year.

Wednesday marks the beginning of the GDC Main Conference, and also marks the opening of the three-day Expo in the Moscone Center's South Hall, home of the expanded Independent Games Festival Pavilion, featuring 36 titles in a larger space than before. Previous attendees know this is where a lot of indies hang out to talk all day and play all the great games on display, and the Expo hall is accessible by any GDC pass holder.

Some of the main competition finalists on at the IGF Pavilion will be Drinkbox Studios' action platformer in a magical Mexican inspired world Guacamelee, Asteroid Base's co-op micro-platformer Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, and Droqen & Ryan Roth's symphonic garden tending and secret-laden Starseed Pilgrim.

Also worth noting are the games in the newly added Excellence in Narrative category, such as Auntie Pixelante's autobiographical game about undergoing hormone replacement therapy Dys4ia and The Fullbright Company's exploration and story discovery game Gone Home.

Joining the main competition finalists will be the eight Best Student Game finalists, including the game-within-a-game ATUM from NHTV IGAD, the MC Escher like game with a narcoleptic protagonist Back to Bed from the Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment, and the blind first-person adventure game Pulse from Vancouver Film School.

On the evening of Wednesday, March 27th, the Independent Games Festival Awards will commence at 6:30pm in the GDC Ballroom located in the West Hall, Street Level, with thousands expected to attend in person, and attendance open to both passholders and the public. The event - and the subsequent Game Developers Choice Awards, which also has a number of indie nominees - is also streaming live online over at GameSpot.

Those wanting a break from the lectures or expo intensity can get in the zone all week at the Wild Rumpus 'indie game world championships'. As previously announced, masterful twitch gamers and novices alike can hone their skills in this special Rumpus Royale, located on the Street Level of the West Hall and open to all GDC passholders.

Partnering with Wild Rumpus, the games to be showcased include Bennett Foddy's running 'simulator' QWOP (in a special new version!), Ramiro Corbetta's acclaimed multiplayer sports game Hokra, Terry Cavanagh's twitchy, twisty Super Hexagon and Beau Blyth's IGF 2013 nominated multiplayer fight to the death Samurai Gunn.

There will be ongoing open-to-all training sessions every day, plus official commentated championships featuring the game's developers and other special guests - from Monday to Thursday at 4pm. Wild Rumpus is just a tip of the event iceberg, with a bunch of playable exhibits located throughout GDC every day, and the GDC Play area sporting 70+ indie and emerging game kiosks from Tuesday to Thursday.

For more information on Game Developers Conference 2013, visit the show's official website - both conference and expo tickets are still available onsite next week in San Francisco, and we'll be updating with the results of the IGF Awards next week.

'Road to the IGF' Pt. 2: more stories behind this year's top indie games

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 01:09:41 +0000

Gamasutra's Road to the IGF continues to highlight every 2013 Independent Games Festival finalist - and here's the second batch of interviews, including Little Inferno, FTL, Inrusion 2 and Spaceteam.

All finalists will be playable at an expanded IGF Pavilion on the Game Developers Conference 2013 Expo floor from March 27-29, 2013, at San Francisco's Moscone Center.

This year's 'Road to the IGF' series continues with interviews on games such as the "spaceship simulation roguelike-like" FTL by Subset Games, the one-step-a-day VESPER.5 by Michael Brough, and the multi-generational family history game 7 Grand Steps by Mousechief.

This second helping of highlights from this year's finalists are as follows:

- Spaceteam creator Henry Smith discusses the various influences he drew inspiration from, and what he plans to do next with the space genre.

- Mousechief's Keith Nemitz talks multi-generational family history game 7 Grand Steps, and how history helps us understand humanity.

- Once you see other people playing Teknopants' games, you really can't wait to jump in and try them for yourself. His latest is Samurai Gunn, and it's up for the design award at IGF.

- Subset Games' "spaceship simulation roguelike-like" FTL took a year-and-a-half to make, but once it launched, it was an overnight sensation. Now it's up for two awards at IGF 2013.

- Imagine a video game in which your character can only take one step per day. Michael Brough not only imagined that game, but he created it in about a week and named it VESPER.5.

- Gamasutra speaks to the team behind the the slightly controversial and decidedly subversive "throw your toys into the fire" send up of social games and consumer culture: Little Inferno.

- Gunstar Heroes, Metal Slug and Castlevania -- these are few of the much-loved side-scrolling action games that inspired Aleksey Abramenko's Intrusion 2, which is up for IGF's Technical award.

- Gamasutra speaks to the team behind the IGF-nominated game, 140, about how marrying platforming and audio is trickier than it might sound at first blush, and why the game's visuals are so abstract.

- "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." It's Newton's third law of motion that's a key influence for David Scamehorn and Alexander Baard's cooperative game Super Space ____.

- Student IGF finalist Back to Bed places a narcoleptic, sleep-walking boy in an M.C. Escher-inspired isometric puzzler, where the player must nudge the boy safely to his bed using a creature from his subconsciousness.

All of these interviews join the seven from the first 2013 'Road to the IGF' recap, including those with Kentucky Route Zero, Cart Life and Incredipede creators. See all of the Road to the IGF interviews on our event page.

The 15th annual Independent Games Festival Awards will announce its winners on the evening of March 27 during GDC 2013, alongside the Game Developers Choice Awards. IGF Award recipients will receive nearly $60,000 of prizes in various categories, including the $30,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

The games highlighted above will join over 20 additional titles at the IGF Pavilion on GDC 2013's Expo floor, accessible to all passholders. GDC still offers over $100 discounts to select pass purchases made by March 20th, at 11:59pm EST, with prices increasing for onsite registration. GDC 2013 itself will take place March 25-29 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

IGF 2013 Audience Award Opens Voting

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 17:52:30 +0000

Game Developers Conference organizers have announced that Audience Award voting for the Independent Games Festival (IGF) Main Competition Awards is now open through March 1, 2013 at 5PM ET.

Winners of IGF 2013 will be announced Wednesday, March 27 during the 2013 Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.

Anyone who would like to vote for the IGF Audience Award can visit the links below, enter the name of the game they'd like to vote for, and a valid email address. Voters will then receive an email to confirm their vote. Certain rules for voting do apply. More information on Audience Award voting can be found at the below link:

Independent Games Festival Main Competition Audience Choice Award nominations

Voters may only select their Audience Award nominees from the list of the Independent Games Festival Main Competition Awards.

The IGF Awards are a major celebration of the best in indie gaming. Each year, its ceremony recognizes and celebrates the creativity, artistry and technical genius of the finest developers and games created in the last year.

The Independent Games Festival Awards will take place starting at 6:30pm PT on Wednesday, March 27. Fans can watch the show live on Twitch.tv or GameSpot.com.

GDC 2013 takes place March 25-29, 2013; more information about the conference and available passes can be found on the official GDC 2013 website.

'Road to the IGF' Pt.1: the stories behind this year's top indie games

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 21:40:27 +0000

Gamasutra's 'Road to the IGF' series is in the process of highlighting every 2013 Independent Games Festival finalist - and here's the first batch of interviews, including Kentucky Route Zero, Cart Life and Incredipede.

All finalists will be playable at an expanded IGF Pavilion on the Game Developers Conference 2013 Expo floor from March 27-29, 2013, at San Francisco's Moscone Center.

This year, the 'Road to the IGF' series has already shared stories of innovation in indie gaming such as Q-Games' Move-controlled audio experiment PixelJunk 4AM, Blendo Games' 10-minute long adventure Thirty Flights of Loving, and more.

The full highlights so far from this year's finalists are as follows:

- Simogo discusses its haunting and intentionally-mysterious Visual Art nominee Year Walk, a divergence from the studio's familiar, cute tone.

- Cardboard Computer reveals the inspiration for Kentucky Route Zero, and why it's glad that the game's Kickstarter came before the big crowd-funding boom.

- Lucky Frame's Yann Seznec shares insights into the music-and-building mobile game Bad Hotel, which has been nominated for an audio award.

- Q-Games' Rowan Parker, lead designer of IGF Excellence in Audio nominee PixelJunk 4AM, talks about the game's style and inspiration, and the role of indies in the changing video game landscape.

- Colin Northway discusses how the idea for Incredipede came about, and how the game's Greenlight debacle actually benefited the game in the end.

- Santa Ragione's Pietro Righi Riva discusses where the idea for MirrorMoon came from, and why game jams are so important to indie studios.

- Richard Hofmeier discusses the long and arduous road of Cart Life, which has finally received a happy ending after many months of worry.

- Blendo Games' Brendon Chung discusses how Thirty Flights of Loving, a short 10-minute long title, can be nominated alongside more lengthy endeavours, and why his games tend to be just that little more diverse and different.

The games highlighted above will join over 20 additional titles at the IGF Pavilion on GDC 2013's Expo floor, accessible to all passholders. Discounted early registration for all passes to GDC 2013 itself ends February 13.

2013 Independent Games Festival announces Student Showcase winners

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 20:58:33 +0000

The Independent Games Festival has announced the eight Student Showcase winners for the fifteenth annual presentation of its prestigious awards, celebrating the brightest and most innovative creations to come out of universities and games programs from around the world in the past year.

This year's showcase of top student talent include the first-person meta-videogame ATUM, from the Netherlands' NHTV IGAD, the similarly meta-game-ified pen & paper RPG Knights of Pen & Paper, from Brazil's Instituto de Ensino Superior de Brasilia & Universidade de Brasilia, and the Jet Set Radio-esque Zineth, a game which "celebrates speed, movement & Twitter", from students of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In total, this year's Student Competition took in over 300 game entries across all platforms -- PC, console and mobile -- from a wide diversity of the world's most prestigious universities and games programs making the Student IGF one of the world's largest showcases of student talent.

All of the Student Showcase winners announced today will be playable on the Expo show floor at the 27th Game Developers Conference, to be held in San Francisco starting March 25th, 2013. Each team will receive a $1,000 prize for being selected into the Showcase, and are finalists for an additional $3,000 prize for Best Student Game, to be revealed during the Independent Games Festival Awards on March 27th.

The full list of Student Showcase winners for the 2013 Independent Games Festival, along with 'honorable mentions' to those top-quality games that didn't quite make it to finalist status, are as follows:

ATUM (NHTV IGAD)
Back to Bed (Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment)
Blackwell's Asylum (Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment)
Farsh (NHTV IGAD)
Knights of Pen & Paper (IESB - Instituto de Ensino Superior de Brasilia & UnB - Universidade de Brasilia)
the mindfulxp volume (Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center)
Pulse (Vancouver Film School)
Zineth (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)

Honorable mentions: Anodyne (University of Chicago and Carleton College); Chrono Disfunglement (DigiPen Institute of Technology Singapore); The Moonlighters (University of Southern California, Interactive Media Division); Narcosis (ENJMIN); Plushy Knight (Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy); SerpenteS (ENJMIN); SneakSneak (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht); Tales From The Minus Lab (University of Southern California)

This year's Student IGF entries were distributed to an opt-in subset of the main competition judging body, consisting of more than 100 leading independent and mainstream developers, academics and journalists.

Now in its eleventh year as a part of the larger Independent Games Festival, the Student Showcase highlights up-and-coming talent from worldwide university programs, and has served as the venue which first premiered numerous now-widely-recognized names including DigiPen's Narbacular Drop and Tag: The Power of Paint, which would evolve first into Valve's acclaimed Portal, with the latter brought on-board for Portal 2.

Others include USC's The Misadventures Of P.B. Winterbottom (later released by 2K Games for XBLA); Hogeschool van de Kunsten's The Blob (later becoming one of THQ's flagship mobile/console franchises as De Blob); and early USC/ThatGameCompany title Cloud, from the studio that would go on to develop PlayStation 3 arthouse mainstays like Flow, Flower, and Journey.

For more information on the Independent Games Festival, for which Main Competition finalists were also just announced, please visit the official IGF website -- and for those interested in registering for GDC 2013, which includes the Independent Games Summit, the IGF Pavilion and the IGF Awards Ceremony, please visit the Game Developers Conference website.

IGF 2013 Student Showcase Nominations Coming January 22nd

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 18:45:16 +0000

Due to an error on our official rules page, which showed two separate dates -- each incorrect -- for the announcement of the nominees for this year's IGF Student Showcase, a quick update on the correct timing.

Our body of nearly 250 judges are currently evaluating all of the over 300 entrants into this year's Student competition, and we will be releasing the names of the winning games on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013.

This year, the show will select a total of eight student teams, all of which will receive the opportunity to show off their games at the IGF Pavilion at GDC 2013 in March. All teams in the IGF Student Showcase will also be eligible to receive an enhanced $1,000 cash prize.

In addition, the IGF student finalists will also compete for the IGF Best Student Game Award. The recipient will be revealed during GDC's prestigious IGF Awards ceremony, and the winning game will receive an additional cash prize of $3,000.

The award ceremony will take place Wednesday, March 27, 2013, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and the IGF Pavilion will remain open from March 27-29. The sister Independent Games Summit event, meanwhile, will be held on March 25 and 26.

All of the Independent Games Festival events take place as part of the 2013 Game Developers Conference, which is held March 25th - March 29th, 2013 in San Francisco, and the IGF continues as the most vital showcase of independent game talent across the wide spectrum of artistically- and commercially-aimed development.

2013 Independent Games Festival Announces Main Competition Finalists

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 16:09:50 +0000

The Independent Games Festival (IGF) juries are announcing the Main Competition finalists for its historic 15th annual awards - nominating nearly 30 outstanding independent game titles to come out of the worldwide community in the past year.

This year's finalists for the most prestigious independent video game awards and showcase were each picked by a discipline-specific set of expert juries, following playthroughs and recommendations of the 580+ IGF entries from over 200 top independent game experts.

Some of the multiple-nominated games for this year's extremely diverse Festival include Cardboard Computer's 'magical realist adventure game' Kentucky Route Zero, Subset Games' spaceship sim 'Roguelike-like' FTL, and Richard Hofmeier's stark, dense street vendor simulator Cart Life.

The first-ever Excellence in Narrative Award is also showcasing unique titles such as Blendo Games' quirky 'first-person short story' Thirty Flights Of Loving, Auntie Pixelante's autobiographical game about a trans woman undergoing HRT, Dys4ia, and The Fullbright Company's abandoned house mystery Gone Home.

The Nuovo Award, once again honoring 'abstract... and unconventional game development' of all kinds, also saw many standout games competing for its $5,000 prize, including Sleeping Beast's irreverent local co-op sci-fi smartphone game Spaceteam, Michael Brough's 'one move a day for 100 days' VESPER.5,and Mousechief's multi-generational family history title 7 Grand Steps.

The full list of finalists for the 2013 Independent Games Festival, with jury-picked "honorable mentions" to those top-quality games that didn't quite make it to finalist status, is as follows:

Excellence In Visual Art
Incredipede (Northway Games and Thomas Shahan)
Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)
Guacamelee! (Drinkbox Studios)
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime (Asteroid Base)
Year Walk (Simogo)

Honorable mentions: Fly'n (Ankama Play); Eleven (Christoffer Hedborg, Datahowler); The Bridge (Ty Taylor and Mario Castaneda); Thomas Was Alone (Mike Bithell, David Housden and Danny Wallace); Hundreds (Semi Secret feat. aeiowu)

Excellence In Narrative
Thirty Flights of Loving (Blendo Games)
Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier)
Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)
Dys4ia (Auntie Pixelante)
Gone Home (The Fullbright Company)

Honorable mentions: Goblet Grotto (thecatamites, j chastain, NEW VADERS); Analogue: A Hate Story (Christine Love); Papo & Yo (Minority Media); The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe); 7 Grand Steps (Mousechief)

Technical Excellence
StarForge (CodeHatch)
Perspective (DigiPen Widdershins)
Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation)
Intrusion 2 (Aleksey Abramenko)
LiquidSketch (Tobias Neukom)

Honorable mentions: Mobiloid (Monty Melby); Skulls Of The Shogun (17-BIT); Foldit (University of Washington); 140 (Jeppe Carlsen); Gateways (Smudged Cat Games)

Excellence In Design
Samurai Gunn (Beau Blyth)
FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games)
Starseed Pilgrim (Droqen & Ryan Roth)
Super Hexagon (Terry Cavanagh)
Super Space ______ (David Scamehorn & Alexander Baard/DigiPen)

Honorable mentions: Spaceteam (Henry Smith); Helix (Michael Brough); Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation); Rymdkapsel (Martin Jonasson, Grapefrukt Games); Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games)

Excellence In Audio
Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)
Bad Hotel (Lucky Frame)
140 (Jeppe Carlsen)
Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games)
Pixeljunk 4AM (Q-Games)

Honorable mentions: Thomas Was Alone (Mike Bithell, David Housden and Danny Wallace); Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation); Gone Home (The Fullbright Company); Fract OSC (Phosfiend Systems); Dust: An Elysian Tale (Humble Hearts)

Nuovo Award
[Designed 'to honor abstract... and unconventional game development'.]
Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier)
Spaceteam (Henry Smith)
Dys4ia (Auntie Pixelante)
Bientot l'ete (Tale of Tales)
7 Grand Steps (Mousechief)
MirrorMoon (SantaRagione + BloodyMonkey)
VESPER.5 (Michael Brough)
Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation)

Honorable mentions: Renga (wallFour); Starseed Pilgrim (Droqen & Ryan Roth); Frog Fractions (Twinbeard); Thirty Flights of Loving (Blendo Games); The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe)

Seumas McNally Grand Prize
Hotline Miami (Dennaton Games)
FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games)
Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier)
Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation)
Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer)

Honorable mentions: Gone Home (The Fullbright Company); Thirty Flights of Loving (Blendo Games); The Stanley Parable (Galactic Cafe); Super Hexagon (Terry Cavanagh); Starseed Pilgrim (Droqen & Ryan Roth)

All finalist games will be playable at an expanded IGF Pavilion on the Game Developers Conference 2013 Expo floor from March 27-29, 2013, at San Francisco's Moscone Center, as part of a week of independent game-related content that also includes the Independent Games Summit (March 25th-26th), and the IGF Awards ceremony itself.

The IGF Awards, where this year's IGF winners will be unveiled, will be held on the evening of Wednesday, March 27th at the Moscone, alongside the Game Developers Choice Awards. IGF Awards recipients will receive nearly $60,000 of prizes in various categories, including the $30,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

As part of this year's event, all IGF Main Competition finalists will receive the opportunity to accept a distribution agreement for Valve's Steam, a leading platform for distribution in today's burgeoning independent gaming market.

The Independent Games Festival was established by UBM Tech's Game Network (which also owns Gamasutra) to encourage the rise of independent game development and to recognize the best independent game titles. Finalists and winners since its 1999 debut have included landmark games such as Braid, World of Goo, Super Meat Boy, Portal predecessor Narbacular Drop, Minecraft, and a host of others.

IGF Student Showcase award winners, contending for the Best Student Game award at the Festival, will be announced on Monday, January 14th, and voting for an IGF Audience Award winner from all Main Competition finalists will kick off in early February. (In addition, the sponsor-supported Microsoft Studios Prize, awarded to Capy's Super T.I.M.E. Force in 2012, is still to be decided from all IGF Main Competition entrants.)

For more information on the Independent Games Festival, please visit the official IGF website - and for those interested in registering for GDC 2013, which includes the Independent Games Summit, the IGF Pavilion and the IGF Awards Ceremony, please visit the Game Developers Conference website.

IGF 2013 highlights Visual Art, Audio Award jurors

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 23:13:16 +0000

Organizers of the 2013 Independent Games Festival are pleased to announce the latest additions to its discipline-specific jury panels that will determine the finalists and winner of its various awards.

The latest jury rundown following prior announcements of its Nuovo and debut Narrative Award jurists, as well as this year's Design and Technical Excellence juries.

The Excellence in Visual Art Award

The Visual Art award is a category which seeks to highlight the innovation and quality in visuals for indie games.

Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Visual Art award have been entrants which featured impressive displays of the craft of games, including The Behemoth's vibrant cartoon-ish beat-em-up Castle Crashers, Polytron's 2D/3D "trixel"-based puzzle platformer Fez, Amanita Design's hand-painted adventure game Machinarium, Playdead's equal parts soft and stark monochromatic puzzler Limbo, and thechineseroom's ambient first-person exploration game Dear Esther.

The jury consists of the following:

- Grant Duncan (founding member & artist on Hello Games' IGF finalist Joe Danger)
- Jen Zee (Supergiant Games art director on games including Bastion)
- Jakub Dvorsky (founder, Amanita Design, creators of multiple IGF award winning games like Samorost, Machinarium & Botanicula)
- Ben Esposito (independent artist & designer, most recently level designer of The Unfinished Swan)
- Sara Gross (independent illustrator and artist on games like Oregon Whale)
- Beth Maher (illustrator, designer and developer of games like Kreayshawn: the Game)
- Steven Burgess (former designer of Frontier's LostWinds, now working with Hello Games on the iOS version of Joe Danger)
- Kelly Smith (artist & animator at Capy on games including Critter Crunch & Clash of Heroes)
- Richard Hogg (artist on Honeyslug games including Poto & Cabenga, Frobisher Says & IGF finalist Hohokum)
- Patrick Smith (as 'Vectorpark', creator of games & interactive toys like Windosill, Feed the Head & Levers)

The Excellence In Audio Award

The Excellence in Audio Award is a category which seeks to highlight the best musical and sound innovation, quality, and impressiveness in independent gaming.

Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Excellence in Audio award have gone out to games which took an entirely new and unique to approach to sound in games or otherwise excelled at their craft, including Queasy Games' abstract acoustic guitar shooter Everyday Shooter, PixelJunk Eden from Q-Games and Osaka musician/DJ Baiyon, and Amanita Design's delightful & charming adventure Botanicula.

The jury includes the following:

- Shaw-Han Liem (co-creator and audio lead of Queasy Games' Sound Shapes, performs as I Am Robot And Proud)
- Darren Korb (audio lead at Bastion creators Supergiant Games)
- David Lloyd & Larry Oji (respectively, musician and founder of game music site OverClocked ReMix; OCR head and soundtrack director on Capcom's Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.)
- Emily Ridgway (music director and audio designer on games like BioShock, Brutal Legend & Costume Quest)
- Laura Shigihara (composer, developer, and singer-songwriter best known for her work on Plants Vs. Zombies)
- Damien Kastbauer (audio designer with credits on games including XCOM, Uncharted, Rock Band, Drawn To Life, and Sam & Max)
- Kristen Quebe (audio designer with credits on games including Condemned, Fable & Halo)

All entries in the 2013 Independent Games Festival Main Competition are currently browsable at the IGF's official site, where you can also soon find more complete biographical information on all of this year's juries, as more are announced over the next few weeks. (The IGF is part of the UBM Tech Game Network, as is this website.)

Main Competition finalists will be announced -- along with a jury statement detailing the thought process behind selecting its lineup -- on Monday, January 7th 2013, with the winner announced on the evening of March 27th at the live-streamed, multi-thousand person attended IGF Awards ceremony during GDC 2013 -- for which registration is now open.

IGF 2013 highlights initial Design, Technical Award jurors

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 23:41:41 +0000

The jury announcements for this year are beginning with some of the industry professionals, independent game notables and former IGF award winners that will make up its Excellence in Design and Technical Achievement Awards, as well as high-profile additions to its Nuovo and Narrative awards, the first members of which were recently announced.

Former Journey producer and designer and current Funomena co-founder Robin Hunicke will be joining both the Nuovo and Narrative juries. Also joining the Narrative jury is Telltale writer and designer Sean Vanaman, notable for his work co-writing the recent award-winning Walking Dead adventure series. And the Nuovo Award jury will also see the inclusion of designer, curator and Kokoromi art collective co-founder Heather Kelley and Lea Schoenfelder, creator of former IGF finalist Ulitsa Dimitrova.

While the juries continue to be assembled in advance of the kick-off of our next phase of the finalist selection process, we're happy to announce the following confirmed jurists.

The Excellence in Design Award

The Excellence in Design award is a category which seeks to highlight the innovation and quality of the underlying blueprint of each entered game -- component parts like its mechanic design, level design, and difficulty balancing.

Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Excellence in Design Award have included 2D Boy's cartoon construction puzzler World of Goo, Pocketwatch Games' abstracted multiplayer heist game Monaco, QCF's rogue-like puzzler Desktop Dungeons and procedurally-generated platformer Spelunky.

The confirmed jury to date consists of the following:

- George Fan (freelance designer & creator of Plants vs. Zombies)
- Ricky Haggett (co-founder of Frobisher Says & Hohokum creators Honeyslug)
- Cindy Poremba (researcher, artist and curator, member of game/art collective Kokoromi)
- Edmund McMillen (creator of games including Super Meat Boy & The Binding of Isaac)
- Chelsea Howe (SuperBetter Labs & Zynga designer, creator of indie titles including The End Of Us)
- Petri Purho (designer of the IGF award winning Crayon Physics Deluxe)
- Bennett Foddy (creator of QWOP, CLOP & IGF finalist GIRP)
- Danny Day (co-creator of IGF winner Desktop Dungeons)
- Kevin Cancienne (designer of games including Drop7)
- Kevin Zuhn (creative director of IGF student showcase finalist OctoDad)
- Joel Burgess (senior designer at Bethesda on games including Fallout 3 & Skyrim)

The Technical Excellence Award

The Technical Excellence award is a category which seeks to highlight the innovation and quality in game engines and code.

Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Technical Excellence award have gone to entrants which featured impressive displays of the craft of games, including Dylan Fitterer's sonic-landscape racing/puzzle category finalist Audiosurf and that year's winner from 2D Boy, World of Goo, Data Realms' 2009 2D platforming-action winner Cortex Command, 2010 winner Limbo, and Frictional Games' 2011 winner Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

The confirmed jury to date consists of the following:

- Brett Douville (LucasArts veteran and lead programmer at Skyrim creators Bethesda)
- Paul Du Bois (senior programmer at Psychonauts Brutal Legend creators Double Fine)
- Renaud Bedard (Capy and former Polytron engineer behind IGF award-winning Fez)
- Anna Kipnis (AI and game play programmer for Double Fine)
- Chris Delay (Lead designer, artist and programmer at Introversion, creator of Uplink, DEFCON & the IGF award-winning Darwinia
- Ivan Safrin (Visual artist and programmer behind games like Owl Country & Bit World)
- Tyler Glaiel (creator of IGF award winner Closure)
- Andy Nealen (games researcher at NYU Poly & core team member of Hemisphere Games, creators of the IGF award-winning Osmos)
- Alex May (co-creator of IGF finalist Eufloria)
- Andy Hull (programmer of IGF winner Spelunky)

IGF, Valve to offer Steam distribution agreements to all 2013 Main Competition finalists

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:18:38 +0000

The organizers of the Independent Games Festival, the leading showcase for independent video games worldwide, have announced a new agreement with Valve for IGF 2013.

All IGF Main Competition finalists for this year's event will receive the opportunity to accept a distribution agreement for Steam, a leading platform for distribution in today's burgeoning independent gaming market.

This means every single Main Competition finalist in each of the jury-voted categories - the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence In Design, Excellence In Art, Excellence In Narrative, Technical Excellence, Excellence in Audio, and even the Nuovo Award - can work directly with Steam to bring their titles to PC, Mac and Linux.

This agreement comes as the 2013 Independent Games Festival rolls out its new, cutting-edge judging website back-end - including a dedicated mobile judge app, social-style discussion tools for games, and the ability for judges and contestants to easily connect to resolve technical problems.

With over 200 distinguished judges discussing and recommending titles for named, discipline-specific juries in each of the seven main categories, IGF 2013 will announce its finalists in January 2013, and award winners at Game Developers Conference 2013 in San Francisco this March.

Finalists and winners of the Independent Games Festival since its 1999 debut have included landmark indie games such as Braid, World of Goo, Super Meat Boy, Portal predecessor Narbacular Drop, Minecraft, and a host of other seminal titles. Valve joins other supporters of the 2013 IGF including media sponsors Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine, as well as Platinum Sponsor Microsoft Studios and Platinum Student Showcase Sponsor DigiPen.

IGF 2013 debuts initial Nuovo, Narrative Award jurors

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 23:21:50 +0000

Organizers of the 2013 Independent Games Festival are pleased to announce the first discipline-specific jury panels that will determine the finalists and winner of its various awards.

The jury announcements for this year are beginning with some of the industry professionals, independent game notables and former IGF award winners that make up its Nuovo award, as well as its first ever Excellence in Narrative Award.

While the juries are still being assembled in advance of the kick-off of our next phase of the finalist selection process, we're happy to announce the following confirmed jurists.

The Excellence in Narrative Award

The following jurists are among those chosen to lead the IGF's debut Excellence in Narrative award, which is intended to recognize innovation, quality, and impressiveness of storytelling in a game, including, but not limited to, scenario, plot construction, story, and dialogue.

The Excellence in Narrative jury will include the following:

- Emily Short (creative director at Linden Lab & author of interactive fiction works including Galatea and Alabaster)
- Dan Pinchbeck (thechineseroom co-founder and co-creator of 2012 winner Dear Esther)
- Rob Dubbin (Emmy-award winning writer for the Colbert Report, as well as IF works Earl Grey & the Facebook reboot of Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego?)
- Jim Munroe (author, filmmaker, and writer of interactive works including Everybody Dies, Guilded Youth & Unmanned)
- Chris Dahlen (journalist and writer on the recent Mark of the Ninja)
- Ben Schroder (journalist and writer on Funcom's MMO The Secret World)
- Wiley Wiggins (founder of Karakasa Games, currently producing iPad adventure Thunderbeam)

The Nuovo Award

Now in its fifth year, the Nuovo Award -- which allows more esoteric 'art games' to compete on their own terms alongside longer-form indie titles -- has previously been awarded to Jason Rohrer's abstract multiplayer title Between, Tuning -- the perception-warping platform puzzler from Swedish indie Cactus, and Messhof's low-res tug-of-war battler Nidhogg.

The Nuovo jury will include the following:

- Stephen Lavelle (better known as 'increpare', creator of 2012 Design finalist English Country Tune.)
- Pippin Barr (video game maker, critic, and author of 'How to Play a Video Game')
- Nicolai Troshinsky (illustrator, filmmaker, and creator of UFO on Tape & 2011 Nuovo finalist Loop Raccord)
- Frank Lantz (creative director and co-founder of Area/Code)
- Rod Humble (CEO of Second Life creator Linden Lab, and experimental game creator behind The Marriage and Stars Over Half Moon Bay)
- Paolo Pedercini (game developer at Molleindustria [Phone Story, Every Day The Same Dream], artist and educator at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University)
- Jason Rohrer (independent developer and creator of Inside a Star-filled Sky, Sleep Is Death, Passage and 2009 Nuovo winner Between)
- Jeroen D Stout (co-founder of Stout Games, the studio behind IGF 2011 Nuovo nominee Dinner Date)
- Daniel Benmergui (independent developer, author, creator of Nuovo finalists Today I Die & Storyteller)

All entries in the 2013 Independent Games Festival are currently browsable at the IGF's official site, where you can also soon find more complete biographical information on all of this year's juries, as more are announced over the next few weeks. (The IGF is part of the UBM Tech Game Network, as is this website.)

IGF 2013 Adds 'Excellence in Narrative' Category

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 17:33:19 +0000

[Independent Games Festival chairman Brandon Boyer is interrupting this year's Festival for a brief but important announcement.]

Hello everybody, and welcome to a special IGF 2013 mid-stream announcement that, after much careful consideration and discussion, we decided was a necessity:

We're adding a new category to this year's festival, Excellence in Narrative.

This may not come as too much of a shock, because it's something that judges, entrants, and the general public have been asking for for quite some time now. Our initial decision to not add the category was not one we took lightly.

It was the subject of many rounds of internal discussion on both the necessity and logistics of adding a category devoted to recognizing narrative innovation, especially as we were making strides to remove categories and pare the festival down to a few core essentials.

But as judging kicked off in early October, it was clear that there was something special about this year's lineup of games in particular that made the absence of a Narrative category especially conspicuous. And so, because so many of our judges have said there are so many games in this year's festival that they specifically want to recognize for their world and their story, we are giving them an avenue to do so.

We'll be defining this new Excellence in Narrative category in much the same way our sister festival, the Game Developers Choice Awards, does: it's a category to recognize "innovation, quality, and impressiveness of storytelling in a game, including, but not limited to, scenario, plot construction, story, dialogue, and other major factors."

This doesn't mean that games eligible for the award are required to be particularly text-heavy. If anything, indies have proven extremely adept at telling stories and constructing compelling worlds in unique and surprising ways.

We're confident our community of judges and jurists will do a fantastic job of laying down their own guidelines and parameters for what the award will come to mean this year and for all years to follow.

(Judges are able to go into our system and shift their existing recommendations to reflect this change, so any games that have already been looked at will not lose out. And we are adding $3,000 to the prize pot so the 'Excellence In Narrative' award gets the same recompense as all the others.)

With all of that said, it's also important to note that this does mean one more change to how the IGF operates this year:

We'll be returning to our previous standard of five finalists per category.

This year's striking of the Mobile category left us with enough space to add one additional finalist to our Technical Excellence, Audio, Visual Art, Design categories, as well as the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, but adding this new Narrative category will mean that we'll be returning to the traditional five finalists per, along with honorable mentions, and the standard eight for Nuovo and Student Showcase.

We hope you'll understand and appreciate the changes we've made, and will continue to make in coming years, as the both the landscape of independent development and the festival itself grows and evolves.

If you have any questions or concerns about any of the above, don't hesitate to drop me a line at chairman@igf.com. Once again, many thanks to all of our judges who have taken the time and effort beyond their standard duties to provide feedback and make this festival even better!

IGF China 2012 winners led by CubeTractor, Fish

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:35:40 +0000

The Independent Games Festival China has revealed the Main Competition and Student winners for its 2012 award ceremony, which celebrates the most creative indie games from throughout the Pan-Pacific area.

The GDC China co-located event is now in its fourth year, and the victors were led by Best Game winner, retro-inspired puzzler Cubetractor, and abstract action Best Student Game winner Fish.

Drawing from a prize pool totaling 45,000 RMB (roughly $7,150), IGF China's Main Competition gave away awards covering Excellence in Audio, Design, Technology, and Visual Arts, as well as the Best Mobile Game and Best Game awards.

Three awards -- for Best Student Game and Excellent Student Winners -- offered 13,000 RMB (roughly $2,050) in cash prizes, and the winners were revealed in a ceremony in Shanghai during GDC China.

Here are the winners for this year's IGF China:

Main Competition Winners

Excellence in Visual Arts (RMB5,000 ~ $780 USD)

Flying Daggers, by Sparklet Studio, China [Website, Video]

Excellence in Audio (RMB5,000 ~ $780 USD)

Dustforce, by Hitbox Team, Australia [Website, Video]

Excellence in Technology (RMB5,000 ~ $780 USD)

Insecters War, by Peng Fang and Zhilong Chen, China [Website]

Excellence in Design (RMB5,000 ~ $780 USD)

Diggin' Dogs, by Soap Creative, Australia [Website, Video]

Best Mobile Game (RMB5,000 ~ $780 USD)

Jumpmaster, by Steamyrice Entertainment, China [Website]

Best Game (RMB20,000 ~ $3,150 USD)

Cubetractor, by Ludochip, Singapore [Website, Video]

Student

IGF Excellent Student Winner (RMB3,000 ~$470 USD, 2 Winners)

Cloud and Boy, by Riqiang Chen, Taiwan

Magic Beans Campus, by Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, China [Video]

Best Student Game (RMB10,000 ~ $1,570 USD, 1 Winner)

Fish, by Yi Wang, China

Organizers also took the opportunity to point out a number of previous IGF China nominees or winners that have gone on to notability - highlighting Subset Games' FTL, with a successful Kickstarter and worldwide launch, as well as last year's finalist One Tap Hero from Coconut Island, published by Chillingo for iOS.

The announcements come as the worldwide Independent Games Festival is in mid-judging, with finalists for that GDC 2013 co-located event due to be announced in January 2013.