Yesterday the IGF announced the 2009 nominees for the Independent Games Festival to be held at this year’s GDC. A quick refresher for those new to the IGF: the Independent Games Festival represents one of the biggest chances for publicity for indie developers. If your game gets chosen it will receive marketing and publicity that would be unheard of for a typical indie game. Getting accepted into the IGF is not just a huge honor, but essentially the proverbial Golden Ticket for indies.
You can see the full list of nominees here. Some quick thoughts on a few of the games.
Dyson by Rudolf Kremers and Alex May
Dyson deserves mention for being not only one of the more unique entries (a procedurally-generated realtime strategy game), but also because it began its humble origins as a game created for the Procedural Generation competition on TIGSource. It’s not the first game to come out from that particular compo (sin(Surfing) was the first to that claim), but its great seeing
Pixeljunk Eden by Q-Games
The murmurings from the indie peanut gallery is showing some dissatisfaction with how Q-Games is handling their submission of their Pixeljunk line, first with Pixeljunk Racers 2 years ago and Pixeljunk Eden this year. Eden was nominated in 3 different categories (technical excellence, audio, and visual art). The IGF is seen more than anything as an opportunity to raise the profile of lesser-known indies. Q, with its publishing contract with Sony and its prominent line of games on the Playstation Network doesn’t seem to qualify as a developer who needs particularly more publicity. It’s a sign of independent games maturing as you get a larger range of developers that constitute “indie” and the related controversy with those on the edge.
More IGF review tomorrow!
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