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Increasingly, the Independent Games Festival is where smart game publishers go to find tomorrow's big hits. Games like Braid, World of Goo, flow and Everyday Shooter all had their start here.
I've spent the past week or two methodically playing though a list of Independent Games Festival entries as a judge for the annual indie awards.
Hey, it's Owlboy! We met him in September. If you don't remember, he looked great. In this, our first look at gameplay footage for the indie platformer, he still looks great.
I've been working my way through the list of independent games for next year's Independent Games Festival, judging the titles as I play through chunks of them on my laptop.
The Java4K 2009 contest will find the best Java game written in 4K in the year of 2009. It's that simple. Oh, wait... you can enter it now in 2008. Crazy!
Great news for fans of independent game development! World of Goo, the game created by former Maxis and EA employees Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel, has gone gold. We've been following World of Goo for quite some time now, from early gameplay clips to its stint as an Independent Games Festival award nominee, which earned the title awards for Technical Excellence and Design Innovation. Start looking for the lovely PC box art on store shelves in November.
There is also a WiiWare version of the game, which has just been submitted to Nintendo for approval and is expected to hit shortly before the PC retail release, along with a downloadable version for PC gamers who could do without the box. We congratulate Kyle and Ron and wish them the best of luck with what looks to be an extremely unique game!
Pretty big news... [2D Boy Blog]
London-based indie studio Beatnik Games have released a trailer for their debut title - Plain Sight.
Plain Sight is a multiplayer action title for PC and Xbox 360. Players control cute little robot skeletons that fly around a stylized environment and hit each other with swords to amass points. To 'bank' your points, you must blow yourself up - taking out as many of your rivals as possible.
Yes, it is essentially a game about suicide bombing robots. But it's ok - they are cute! And the background looks a bit like Tron, which can't be bad.
When former XNA community manager David Weller expressed concerns about crowding and quality standards when the new Community Games launch on Xbox Live, it resembled some of the discussions that have been had in the past regarding Xbox Live Arcade.
However, a Microsoft representative was quick to respond to Weller's concern that the company has a quality control problem, highlighting a few key ways that it plans to ensure its users get the best experience.
Now, just about anyone can be a game developer — and get paid for it, too. At its Gamefest 2008 event today, Microsoft announced that community games made using its XNA tools will be downloadable via either PC or Xbox 360, and that the creators will get 70 percent of the revenues, as we reported earlier today.
We spoke to game developers' group general manager Chris Satchell about the new community initiative. "We realised there was so much creativity out there in the community", he said. "So many people had great ideas, so we needed to give them a toolset to express themselves... and then we had to give them that worldwide stage where they could show it. And then the final step is, why not let them benefit from it?"
Microsoft saw, Satchell said, that incredible innovation came from viral communities of indie game designers across the web, and hoped to capture some of that community for its users. Satchell hopes that community games will become viral in the same way:
The 11th Annual Independent Games Festival opened their doors today, saying they're officially ready to start taking submissions for the annual festival.
Submissions to the contest are due by this November with finalists expected to be announced in January.
In addition to the $US 20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize and the awards the festival already gives out for audio, art direction, design and technology, this time around the IGF will also be presenting a new Innovation Award. The award is "intended to honour abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development".
As always, I expect to see a slew of interesting titles as I help judge the competition. Previous years have seen such greats as Everyday Shooter, Audiosurf and World of Goo.
