igf-2010 posts

During GDC 2010 on Thursday night the award ceremonies for the 2010 Independent Games Festival were held. While more and more contests and awards have been launching as of late for the indie games scene, the IGF still remains the most prestigious of all these awards with many award winners turning into big critical and sales hits.

The top award, the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game, was won this year by Monaco, the co-op themed crime caper title from developer Pocketwatch Games. Monaco also won in the Excellence in Design category. In the Vision Award category, which nets the winning team $10,000 as sponsored by Direct2Drive, the winner was Max and the Magic Marker, the unique puzzle-drawing game from developer Press Play. You can check out the full list of winners after the jump.

The Independent Games Festival awards a lot of stuff on their own and they will do so again next month during the 2010 Game Developers Conference, However one of their awards, the Vision Award, is given out with the help of the PC game download site Direct2Drive. The award gives $10,000 to a game that has "new ideas and concepts that will help spark innovation in gaming".

The five finalists this year for the second annual award include games about a daredevil cyclist, a magic drawing device and a living piece of meat. We will see which one of the five games below gets the Vision Award during the IGF 2010 ceremonies on March 11.

• HurricaneX2
• Joe Danger
• Max and the Magic Marker
• Nyxquest: Kindred Spirits
• Super Meat Boy

With the IGF finalists announced, game makers only have a short while longer to find out the best of the best in indie games from last year. From the best overall game to the one with the most impressive art, there's several different categories for indie game designers to aspire to be the top of. This week we're going to take a look at a few of the games that have made it to the finals.

It's time for the final, and most important, category in the IGF. The Seamus McNally Grand Prize holds the largest cash reward and prestige out of any category, and for good reason. Here are games that epitomize polished perfection, and whoever wins the grand prize is sure to find publishers knocking on their door for an exclusive deal. Every game in the grand prize category this year was in one of the other minor cateogries, which is not particularly shocking, even tif it does not happen all that often. If you look back upon previous years, there's normally one game that makes it to the grand prize that doesn't quite fit anywhere else. This year, that's not the case. These games are the best of the best, and they deserved to be honored.

With the IGF finalists announced, game makers only have a short while longer to find out the best of the best in indie games from last year. From the best overall game to the one with the most impressive art, there's several different categories for indie game designers to aspire to be the top of. This week we're going to take a look at a few of the games that have made it to the finals.

The games which truly exhibit technical excellence in the indie realm are often praised beyond all potential comparison. After all, technical advances here such as HDR lighting aren't the real technical advances. It's things that alter the gameplay in interesting ways while still being smooth and presentable that really excite indie gamers. It's interesting how graphics advances are praised as advances in visuals, not in technical creation, where other things are. Here's five games that just can't fit in any other category at the IGF thanks to their unrelenting technical improvements.

With the IGF finalists announced, game makers only have a short while longer to find out the best of the best in indie games from last year. From the best overall game to the one with the most impressive art, there's several different categories for indie game designers to aspire to be the top of. This week we're going to take a look at a few of the games that have made it to the finals.

People love a good art style. Sure, you can make your game so that it's all black pixels and monotony, but if you have a cohesive and engaging visual style, players will like it more. Everybody likes something done well and clearly, and the members of the IGF judging team are no exception. Here are the five games that made the top of the list in visual artistry.

Earlier this month the Indepdendent Games Festival announced their nominees for the 12th annual indie games competition in various catagories. Today the IGF announced the 10 finalists for their Student Showcase division where students or teams of students submit their own games to be judged by the IGF.

The ten finalists, picked from 190 entries, will all be shown during this year's Games Developers Conference in March and one of them will win the Best Student Game Prize of $2,500 when the IGF awards ceremony is held on March 11.

Boryokudan Rue (UCLA)
Continuity (Chalmers University of Technology / University of Gothenburg)
Devil's Tuning Fork (DePaul University)
Dreamside Maroon (DigiPen Institute Of Technology)
Igneous (DigiPen Institute Of Technology)
Paper Cakes (Utrecht School of the Arts & USC)
Puddle (ENJMIN, France)
Puzzle Bloom (DADIU, Denmark)
Spectre (USC Interactive Media)
Ulitsa Dimitrova (Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany)

The Independent Games Festival has wasted no time in the new year. The annual indie games competition has announced the finalists for the various categories for the 2010 edition of its awards. The categories include the big one, the Seamus McNally Grand Prize, where the winning development team gets $20,000. This year's awards also includes the new Nuovo Award which, in the IGF's own words, is supposed to "honor abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games."

A number of games were featured in more than one category this year including the puzzle platformer Closure which got three nominations. You can check out all the nominees after the jump. The winners will be named at the Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco on March 11.

It's the biggest outlet for independent game developers to get their titles notice and today applications opened up for the 2010 version of the annual Independent Games Festival. Developers have until November 1 to submit their games to the festival for the main contest. November 15 is the deadline for entry for the student portion of the festival. Finalists for the main competition will be revealed on January 4 with the student competition finalists revealed on Jan. 11. As usual the winners in both divisions will be announced at a ceremony during the Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco on March 11.

Winning one or more categories in previous IGFs has been a stepping stone for the games and their development teams to get noticed including titles like Audiosurf, World of Goo and Darwinia; This year the games and their dev teams will be competing for nearly $50,000 in prizes in several categories including the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize.