independent-games-festival posts

As expected the sandbox game hit Minecraft and the first person adventure game Amnesia The Dark Decent were the big winners in the 2011 Independent Games Festival awards ceremony during GDC 2011 on Wednesday. Minecraft took the big Seumas McNally Grand Prize worth $20,000 as well as the $2,000 Audience Award according to Game Informer.

Amnesia The Dark Decent won in three catagories including Technical Excellence, Excellence in Audio and the Direct2Drive-sponsored Vision award. Other winners included Bit.Trip Runner for Excellence in Visual Arts, Desktop Dungeons for Excellent in Design, Nidhogg with the Nuovo Award and Fract for Best Student Game.

While game developers and industry members vote for the main catagories for both the Independent Games Festival and the Indie Game Challenge, both contests are letting the general public have their say as well. Both have Audience Awards that allow anyone to vote for their favorite indie games.

The IGF Audience Award lets folks vote for any of the games that have already been named as finalists in the main award catagories. The web site, which requires an email address for voting, is now up with votes taken until February 18. The winning game nets its development team $2,500 and will be announced during the IGF ceremony in early March.

The Indie Game Challenge's Gamer's Choice Award allows anyone to vote for any of the announced professional and non-professional finalists. Again voting has started at the award's official web site and will continue until February 10. The winner will be announced at the DICE Summit in mid-February where the winning team will be awarded $10,000.

There are lots of games that are being developed and released from teams of students. Today the 2011 edition of the Independent Games Festival announced the finalists of its annual Student Showcase. Eight games out of over 280 entries were picked for inclusion for the Showcase.

The games, listed below, will be shown during the IGF's showcase of games at the Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco in early March. Each finalist team gets $500 with the winner of Best Student Award, named on March 2, getting an additional $2,500.

e7 (Gymnasium Koniz Lerbermatt)
Fract (University of Montreal)
GLiD (Bournemouth University)
Octodad (DePaul University)
PaperPlane (ENJMIN)
Solace (DigiPen Institute of Technology)
Tiny and Big (School of Arts and Design Kassel)
Toys (Future Games Academy)

The finalists for the 2011 Independent Games Festival have been announced and fans of two of 2010's most acclaimed and popular indie games, the sandbox title Minecraft and the horror adventure game Amnesia The Dark Descent, have a lot to celebrate. Both games received three nominations each including one for the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

The action-RPG Bastion, which hasn't even been released yet, also scored two nominations for the 2011 IGF awards. The full list of catagories and nominated games can be seen after the jump. The winners will be revealed in a ceremony during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on March 2.

It's the last News Bits and Bytes post of 2010 and indeed it's the last official news post for Big Download for this year as well. We have just one more hour until 2011 shows up on our doorstep. We hope it's friendly.

• The Independent Games Festival has named the people who will sit on the jury for picking the finalists and winner of the festival's 2011 Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
• Steam has released a new automatic update for Arcadia that adds, among other things, a screenshot tool, gamepad support and more.
• Did you know that there was a Greyhound Manager PC game that's in its second incarnation? Now you do.

It may no longer be the only indie game competition in town, or even the one that has the biggest cash prize, but the annual Independent Games Festival is still the one that all the indie game developers want to win. The 13th annual IGF will be held as part of the Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco in early March and this week the IGF revealed all of the games that have been submitted to this year's event.

Over 400 games were submitted which is a new record. As usual it was a mix of previously released titles (such as Minecraft) and games that have yet to be released to the public such as Bastion, Skulls of the Shogun and Spy Party. The finalists for the IGF's various awards will be named in January.

The oldest competition for independent game development has now announced the call for submissions for the 2011 edition. The Independent Games Festival web site is now looking for indie game companies to submit their titles for the 13th annual competition. Games will be competing for nearly $50,000 in total cash prizes including the 20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize.

Games for the main festival will be accepted until October 18 and the Student category will take submissions until November 1. Finalists for both will be announced in January and the winners will be revealed on March 2 during the 2011 Games Developers Conference in San Fransisco. This year the IGF will be expanding what it's calling its Nuovo Award catagory for short experimental "art games" from five to eight finalists.

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.