IGF Award Winners

Posted by Derek Yu Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:56:00 GMT

Former IGF Awards host Andy Schatz (pictured above) got to take the stage again tonight, only this time it was to accept both the Seumas McNally award and the Excellence in Design Award for his 4-player co-op stealth game Monaco. Other winning games included the long-lost Limbo, which won awards for Visual Art and Technical Excellence, Closure, which won Audio, and cactus’s Tuning, which won the Nuovo Award.

You can view the entire show here.

Seumas McNally Grand Prize:

• Joe Danger
• Monaco
• Rocketbirds: Revolution!
• Super Meat Boy!
• Trauma

Excellence in Visual Art:

• Limbo
• Owlboy
• Rocketbirds: Revolution!
• Shank
• Trauma

Excellence in Audio:

• Closure
• Rocketbirds: Revolution!
• Shatter
• Super Meat Boy!
• Trauma

Excellence in Design:

• AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!—A Reckless Disregard For Gravity
• Cogs
• Miegakure
• Monaco
• Star Guard

Nuovo Award:

• A Slow Year
• Closure
• Enviro-Bear 2000
• Today I Die
• Tuning

Technical Excellence:

• Closure
• Limbo
• Heroes of Newerth
• Joe Danger
• Vessel

Student Showcase:

• Boryokudan Rue
• Continuity
• Devils Tuning Fork
• Dreamside Maroon Student Version
• Igneous
• Paper Cakes
• Puddle
• Puzzle Bloom
• Spectre
• Ulitsa Dimitrova

Cactus gave the best IGF acceptance speech I’ve ever heard!

Posted in Community, Developers, Competitions, IGF / GDC | Tags AndySchatz, cactus, JonSchubbe, TylerGlaiel | 48 comments

IGS Photos

Posted by ARelativelyHotGirl Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:35:00 GMT

Coming in live…

Posted in Community, Developers, IGF / GDC | 22 comments

AGS Awards 2009 - Winners

Posted by Derek Yu Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:55:00 GMT

The winners of the AGS Awards 2009 have been announced. These are the best Adventure Game Studio games as voted on by the AGS community. The big winners are Zombiecow’s Time Gentlemen, Please! (Best Game, Best Gameplay, Best Dialogue Writing, Best Non-Player Character), Team Effigy’s The Marionette (Best Original Story, Best Background Art, Best Music, Best Tutorial or Documentation), and Ben304’s Shifters’s Box – Outside In (Best Puzzles, Best Short Game). There are a lot of other games and awards, so check out the award page for the full line-up.

Thanks, bicilotti, for the heads-up.

Posted in Adventure, Community, Competitions | Tags Ben304, TeamEffigy, ZombieCow | 5 comments

Indie Fund

Posted by Derek Yu Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:08:00 GMT

A group of successful indie developers have started Indie Fund, a funding source for independent developers. The 7 backers of the fund (Ron Carmel, Kyle Gabler, Jonathan Blow, Kellee Santiago, Nathan Vella, Matthew Wegner, and Aaron Isaksen) are investing in indie games and supporting their development. The primary goal is to provide a way for indies to create and sell games without having to compromise their vision or legal rights to publishers. Of course, you’d also be getting the advice of some of the community’s most experienced and successful creators.

Currently, the Fund is investing in a few undisclosed indie titles, which happened “through word of mouth within the indie community”. Eventually, though, there will be a way for developers to submit their games. You can find out more about Indie Fund in this Gamasutra Q&A with Ron Carmel of 2D Boy.

Posted in Business, Community, Developers | Tags AaronIsaksen, JonathanBlow, KelleeSantiago, KyleGabler, MatthewWegner, NathanVella, RonCarmel | 57 comments

TIGSource Comicompo 2 Finished!

Posted by Derek Yu Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:21:00 GMT

I’m pleased to announced that we recently finished our second Comicompo on the forums! The Comicompo, started and organized by Mr. Kyle Pulver, is a collaborative project where each person does a comic page after reading only the previous page. The first one was pretty good, but this is all kinds of amazing, what with 45 people participating (25 more than the last)! Open it up and experience the “chay-oss” within. (The thread for Comicompo 2 is here.)

I’ve never been part of an online community with this kind of creative output. Great work, guys! Hopefully the next one will be even better.

Posted in Comics, Cartoons, and Illustration, Community Projects, Community | 29 comments

IGDA Elections – Candidate Scrutiny

Posted by Derek Yu Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:33:00 GMT

IGDA elections for the Board of Directors are going on right now. You have until February 28th (this Sunday) to vote for 5 new Board members. 5 members are also leaving, including Tom Buscaglia, who came under some fire during the Tim Langdell shenanigans.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the International Game Developers Association, it’s a non-profit “professional society for video and computer game developers worldwide” (Wikipedia). It is made of a central organization and many local chapters. Members pay $48 a year for access to IGDA events, products, and services.

People seem to have very differing opinions on the local chapters, which is not surprising, since their quality depends so much on local leaders and members. On the other hand, I’d say people’s opinion of the central org is overall pretty negative. Last year the IGDA was criticized heavily for having Tim “EDGE” Langdell on its Board of Directors and moving very slowly to remove him (he eventually resigned before they could remove him). This was not very long after the IGDA fumbled the Mike Capps situation. Mike, the President of Epic Games, was an IGDA board member when he infamously explained how Epic management expected their employees to work 60+ hours a week on games.

Beyond that, there’s the question of how much the IGDA actually does for game developers, and why they can be so defensive and evasive when one of their own is criticized. With that in mind, this election is important for the IGDA. The idea that another Langdell or Capps is lurking amidst the 23 candidates is a scary thought for members.

Scott Macmillan, an indie developer and a member of the Boston IGDA, realized this and started a section on his website to scrutinize the candidates further. He asked them each a few more specific questions based on their candidate profiles. This is a nice place to start if you’re an IGDA member and are interested in voting.

I’m not an IGDA member, but after reading through Scott’s site, I’d like to share my favorites:

Posted in Community | 41 comments

Space Invaders: Art in the Computer Game Environment

Posted by Guest Reviewer Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:45:00 GMT

[This is a guest article by Thomas Maxwell-Smith. If you’d like to contribute a guest article to TIGSource, go here.]

Space Invaders: Art in the Computer Game Environment is a not-exactly-overdue attempt at moving on the debacle of a debate that is ‘are video games art’ – from whether the two should share a sentence to whether they should share a room.

Situated across the three New Media-focused gallery spaces of Liverpool’s Fact Cinema, the exhibition seeks to “[explore] the increasingly blurred boundaries between videogame spaces and real spaces”, and whilst utterly failing to make any sort of coherent comment on such a thing (what game doesn’t “explore space”), it’s still a pretty fun look at the benefit of experiencing games beyond the comfort of your living room.

Posted in Games and Art?, Community | Tags Alexitron, messhof | 19 comments

To Jim Sterling, Who Hates Art Games

Posted by Derek Yu Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:07:00 GMT

Ah, art games, the lightning rod of indie gaming… Jim Sterling (pictured above) recently wrote a couple of inflammatory articles about art games. The first one is titled “Indie games don’t have to act like indie games” and the second one is titled “Art games aren’t innovative and innovation isn’t good”. The headlines are clearly sensationalistic, but Jim does a reasonable job expressing a common view about art games: they’re stupid, boring, pretentious, and not very innovative. If you scroll through the comments on Destructoid, you’ll see many a “Hear, hear, Jimbo! Preach it, brotha!” People are sick of art games.

But Jim and others, here are some important points that I think are missing from these articles (after the jump):

Posted in Games and Art?, Community | Tags JimSterling, PaulGreasley, RodHumble | 319 comments

For Your Viewing and Playing Pleasure

Posted by ithamore Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:18:00 GMT

Two of our forum members have been working on video series of indie games to which we would like to bring some attention (moshboy’s Underrated Indie Games and ortoslon’s playthroughs), since they are bringing so much attention to a large range of indie games.

Each of the 100 games in the Underrated Indie Games series (originally Obscure Indie Games) was created by a different developer. Many are from developers with which you might not be familiar while some are less familiar games from more well known developers. Each game has a brief video, a concise description, and a link to the game. You could easily spend an evening watching the videos while downloading the games that look interesting to you.

From moshboy’s explanation of the series:

The main reason I started the series was because, over the years, I noticed a bunch of games that weren’t getting full frontpage reviews/coverage on TIGSource or the Indygamer/Indie Games Weblog, so I started making a list on a scrap of paper of the games that I remembered that hadn’t been frontpage reviewed on either one (and since they are the two biggest sources that people go to, to find indie games, I figured most of the games I was listing were pretty obscure, hence the original name of the series).

I think the collection is quite diverse, even though there are some noticeable genres that have been left out such as RPGs, Strategies and car racing games. Many of the developers featured have probably never had a game featured on TIGS or Indie Games, so I’m sure they would get some motivation out of it.

Having finished his first Underrated Indie Games series, moshboy has begun a new series with a similar theme, Indie Games You Might Have Missed, and you can follow it on his Youtube channel and in moshboy’s thread for this newest and all his future indie game series. Additionally, a second iteration of Underrated Indie Games is being planned, but it won’t be have the restriction of 100 developers.

A Note of Warning: My avs caught a virus in Glace, part 85 of the series, and a user at Download.com complained about it having a worm. moshboy said an old computer gave him such a warning in the past, but he has never had one come up on his new computer. So, the risk is up to you if you really want to play it.

After people told ortoslon that beating White Butterfly on punishment wasn’t the easy accomplishment he thought it was, he decided to start making videos for his Youtube channel. It has recordings of “playthoughs, score attacks, speedruns, and compilations” of indie games he likes, which are “mostly challenging, freeware, action games” plus a little variety. Many of the games are from more well know developers and some are from less known developers. The videos display skillful playing (magnitudes better than my own on the same games), and there is a convenient link to each game to provide you with even more games to keep you busy.

This is an on going series for ortoslon, which currently contains over 60 games, and his longer videos of playthroughs are being kindly hosted on Paul Eres’s Youtube channel, so be sure to look through them too.

Posted in Community, Videos | 13 comments

Good Causes

Posted by Derek Yu Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:31:00 GMT

A couple of really cool organizations could use some help:

1. Gamma IV – The fourth iteration of the popular experimental game showcase/dance party, is headed to GDC this year (with over 150 submitted games!). Kokoromi, the show’s organizers, have started a Kickstarter project to help pay for the new venue and hardware for the event. All proceeds will go toward the event and backers can receive a number of sweet goodies donated by other indies (games, GDC passes, soundtracks, comics, etc.).

2. Giant Robot – This might seem slightly out of place, as Giant Robot is an indie Asian pop culture magazine and not an indie game magazine, but GR has hosted a number of fantastic game galleries, and is helping realize LA Game Space, a non-profit “game lab” that seeks to involve children in Los Angeles with game-making and game-makers. The magazine’s creators, Eric and Martin, are asking for donations to help offset the rising cost of print. Again, there is the possibility of getting some great donation gifts if you help out.

Even if you’re not interested in donating, you should check out what these guys are up to and see if it interests you!

Posted in Community, Competitions | Tags GiantRobot, Kokoromi | 10 comments