hmm I noticed a few of our Steam codes for our entry were used just today in the last 3 hours (we didn't get in for anything). I assumed judges had access to whatever games they wanted to judge (but were limited in how many they had at once), then after a certain deadline only the jury members of whatever category the game was selected had access to the game. Or do all judges have access to the games at any time?

Remember that judges are only assigned a subset of games to judge. If there's a finite number of steam codes, you wouldn't take one unless you had time to judge a game or had been assigned to judge it. But today, probably judges are nabbing up any leftover codes before the backend closes, now that there's no chance of depriving someone who has been assigned to judge your game.

/edit also to note: the juries still haven't voted for winners, so if you got nominated, expect a bunch of jurors to download it to check it out if they haven't already.

Looks incredibly beautiful. The art style certainly makes me want to try it out.

I feel like the quality of design feedback on TIGS used to be very high, when it was mostly filled up with developers.

A few successful competitions brought in a lot of players who don't develop games, many of whom were very young. They're generally very enthusiastic and sweet and there is no reason why anyone should ever exclude them, but their feedback consists mostly of empty one-line praise and encouragement. If you look at the feedback threads right now, that hasn't changed since I left.

There's a snowball effect: if developers find it less helpful to get feedback here, they go elsewhere, and the quality of feedback and discussion declines further. So that for me is the main reason why I don't post here anymore.

A related issue concerns the general quality of posts on the boards. With the influx of young posters, there was a huge increase in the amount of no-content meme or GIF posts (just like MeshGearFox is doing in this thread). And maybe this is unfair, but I increasingly started to feel like the most interesting discussions were getting shut down by Paul's pedantic, boring argumentation. (Sorry Paul, I honestly don't mean any offense. But you did ask for people to be less passive-aggressive, so there it is)

There are just more options now, not just Twitter but various other public and private boards and email lists and websites and physical meetups. Since Unity and iOS took off a few years ago, the number of indie developers out there has vastly increased, and there are lots more places to go, many of which have a stricter developer-focus.

And finally, a lot more indie developers are trying to make money making games now, and I guess in that context it might sometimes make less sense to post about an unfinished game on a public forum, where players and journalists might see it before it's ready.

I honestly do miss the 'old TIGSource' but I don't think there's anything anyone could do to bring that back now. It's not really anybody's fault, it's just that the times have changed.

[DESKTOP DUNGEONS WON DESIGN LAST YEAR]

but thanks for the explanation at least. but do you believe it was intentionally an interpretation of bauhaus? incidentally, yes, but i'd be surprised if that were intentional

That's pretty rude, mate. The author of Fader has a background in visual arts. Why should it be surprising if that were intentional?

roguelikes...
...
i feel that if the igf never has any niche games represented

DESKTOP DUNGEONS WON DESIGN LAST YEAR

And this year, Dear Esther is a niche game - it's a game where you walk around and think about emotions (as I understand it, haven't played it yet). To The Moon is a crpg. At a Distance and Mirage are wild experiments.

Sorry, late to the party here.

Paul: did I miss the post where you described your alternate vision for how the IGF judging process should work?

Bennett: same question.

I don't have a problem with it, it seems pretty robust to me.

fader could very well be showing more aesthetic sophistication than those two games, but if someone thinks it does, i'd like to know who they are and why they think so

I'm not very excited about Fader as a game, but as a modern interpretation of Bauhaus design, I think it's beautiful. It has an unusual sensitivity to colour.

Just basing this on the trailer though.

Short Accessible Indie Games Festival

If the game is accessible it won't need to be short.

Accessible Indie Games Festival: what's wrong with that? Why do inaccessible games need to have an equal chance? Suppose we give all the prizes to games that only serious videogame fans could enjoy - how does that help the scene, or the artform as a whole?



/edit there are lots of ways for games to be accessible. The Minecraft wiki model is one example or a non-traditional way.

But the current controversies are all focusing on the wrong things:  100% judge assignment completion is totally irrelevant, and judge playtime is just a tiny piece of the puzzle.

I want to second this. There surely are games that get shortchanged under the current system (especially on mobile), but Kale in Dinoland wasn't one of them. The reason you get 8 or more judges per game is for the sake of redundancy, not because 8 are needed to make a fair assessment at the judging stage. And I think if the four judges who did play it only played for five minutes, that's totally valid too.

It's true you might miss the odd gem if you tend to quit a game that hasn't grabbed you after five minutes. But drawing attention to this kind of slow-burn game isn't really a goal of the IGF. The point is one of two things, or some mix of the two: 1) to identify and promote the best games, for the sake of the growth and popularization of the medium as a whole, or 2) to help to uncover games that aren't well-known and increase the pool of well-known developers.

We can argue all day over whether the IGF should be more about 1) or more about 2), but it's definitely not about giving press to games that make a weak first impression. Sure, it's nice if good slow-burn games get recognized, but it's not anybody's primary goal. So I think if your judges install your game and only want to play it for five minutes, that's a completely valid judgment of it. With those things in mind, I really struggle to see how the Kale guys have a valid complaint.

As someone pointed out on twitter, there is a general fear out there that your game might not get played by a judge at all. That probably does happen sometimes, and it's pretty bad if it does, but the chances are probably best minimized by 1) requiring judges to log comments (even private, jury's-eyes-only comments) on every game that is assigned to them, and 2) not inviting bad judges back the following year. I'm sure the Oscars, Grammies etc have similar hassles.

As a final point, I think it's completely inappropriate that the Kale guys wrote to the judges to nag them to try the game during the judging process. It's almost threatening behaviour, and if I had been one of the judges I would have recused myself at that point.

Huge congratulations, Ivan! This has been a long time in the making, can't wait to put it to good use! 

This game needs a Nebulus level.

Ok I registered. I probably can't be there for the whole thing but at least for a day or two.

Well, GM for mac is out now. Not sure if you can easily convert Windows projects to it though.

Why have the primary colours at all? You can display any colour anywhere you like on a modern VGA display. If you use red to represent another nonred colour, you'll just confuse people. Just make the 'red' button switch to whichever colour it currently represents.

stop feeding the paul, tyler

WHAT IS THIS GAME? I used to play it ALL the time on my snes(i think). that was an awesome, but hardcore game!

Spindizzy Worlds.

How it seemed is actually how it is too  

Well, I think you should change it then! There's no reason to expect the user to memorize the colour assignments (e.g. 'red = lilac, green = khaki') Let the user pick the colour he's using directly.