Hey any TIGSource-rs paying attention - we've opened attendance for the 2014 show (March 17th-21st, 2014!)

I just wanted to make SURE you folks were aware that the Indie Games Summit passes are available and going fast (>50% sold already!) So you might want to go and grab one now:

http://www.gdconf.com/attend/passes.html

Obviously if they sell out you can still get in via some different pass types - you can visit IGF with just an Expo Pass, go to IGS with Summits or All-Access, and there's a bunch of cool stuff happening offsite anyhow - but I really want to make sure ACTUAL indies pick up the indie pass (vs. 'people who see it's the cheapest non-expo pass') so please make us proud

We managed to find a few extra Indie Games Summit only tickets and have donated them to Indie Giving, so there's a nice package you can pay for that will let the proceeds go to the U.S. National Parks Conservancy (and you get into IGS):

http://www.gdconf.com/news/gdc_2013_partners_with_indie_g.html

Last call for dedicated Indie Games Summit passes - only about 15 of them left. (You can still go after that, but you'll need a Summits or All-Access pass.)

Hopefully people are reading this thread, but indies, I would recommend getting your Indie Games Summit pass for GDC 2013 _right now_. Looks like we will sell out of these passes much quicker than last year - half of the allotment is already gone.

(When sold out, you can still get into IGS with other passes, but it's quite a bit more expensive.)

Simon@GDC.

Yep, John, this replaces the 'semi-private' Summit Pass discounts we used to give to IGF entrants.

IMPORTANT NOTE: the first set of Indie Games Summit Passes is almost 70% sold out, last I looked. If you want one, you really _should_ get one soon. We're hoping to release extra tickets if Summit passes don't get too crowded, but cannot guarantee it.

Hey folks,

I decided to keep the title of this post generic-er because it might turn into the general GDC 2012 thread, but I really wanted to point something out to everyone:

http://www.gdconf.com/attend/passes.html

Passes are live for GDC 2012, which is March 5th-9th 2012 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and there is a special Indie Games Summit pass that we have concocted for this year.

It's quite a bit cheaper (half the price of Summits passes) and is meant specially for indies such as you folks.

However - it is somewhat limited (we will eventually run out of room for Indie Games Summit pass holders plus those Summits pass holders who can also come to IGS), so I would highly recommend picking one up sooner (next few weeks) rather than later.

This has been a 'don't get upset later and we're trying to make sure genuine indies pick up this pass' public service announcement

Thanks!
Simon@GDC, IGF etc...

anyway, is the 2013 rule change that they have planned for *all* re-entries, or just re-entries of finalists/winners?

As Brandon Boyer mentions in his 'welcome to this year's IGF' post - http://igf.com/2011/06/letter_from_the_chairman_welco.html :

One of my strongest beliefs is that none of us here at the IGF should act as gate-keepers, rejecting developers as they file in to enter their games, for any reason. I believe that's one of the strengths and the best utilizations of our judge and jury system, allowing the community to set its own tone for the outcome of the festival.

That said, we would like to see the games coming into the festival being prepared for the festival, just as it operates in other creative fields. While some IGF finalists have gone on to win IGF awards when entered in a more complete state, we're making an official stance that finalists of IGF 2012 will be discouraged from re-entering their game in 2013.

The idea is to leave those finalist slots (not to mention judge & jury assignments) open for new works. As this is a transitional year, 2011 finalists will not be discouraged from re-entering any games -- we only add that we're all looking forward to seeing new creations each year, and hope that you, the developers, are confident that your game will shine through amongst the other entries.

Surprised nobody has quoted this yet, given it directly pertains to the matter at hand.

Just a note - all IGS discount help passes are now (long) gone, sadly. We mailed a random subset of IGF entrants and they snaffled them up sharpish. Some discount codes have not been mailed out yet, tho. But if you didn't get an email from us by the end of today [Friday], try again next year. (And thanks for being understanding.)

Reminder for those buying passes: early reg deadline is Monday at midnight!

Hey folks,

Just wanted to check in, since we have some new announcements about who's speaking at the Independent Games Summit (the Mon/Tue of GDC - Feb 28th and March 1st):

http://www.gdconf.com/news/gdc/gdc_2011s_indie_games_summit_a.html

This year's Independent Games Summit, which will run from February 28 to March 1 alongside the 2011 Game Developers Conference at San Francisco's Moscone Center has just added a number of new lectures, including from IGF Grand Prize winner Andy Schatz (Monaco), Eliss/Faraway designer Steph Thirion and industry veteran Luke Schneider (Radiangames series).

Monaco's Schatz will be presenting a lecture called 'How to Win the IGF in 15 Weeks or Less', explaining how the acclaimed co-op heist game was "entered into the IGF after 6 weeks of work by only one person. It became a finalist in the Grand Prize and Excellence in Design after 11 weeks of work. And it won both after 15 weeks."

Along the way, one-man team Schatz "will show how design-by-brownian-motion can not only lead to a better finished product, but a faster schedule as well", as "Monaco's fanciest tech tricks and failed experiments will be revealed."

Elsewhere, Radiangames' Schneider will join Vblank Entertainment's Brian Provinciano, Copenhagen Game Productions' Dajana Dimovska, and Nonchalance's Jeff Hull in a talk titled "The Next Steps of Indie: Four Perspectives", which gives attendees "a glimpse into their unexpected paths in the past, and what we can expect from [them in] the future".

The four sequential 15 minute lectures will cover Radiangames' one-game-per-month strategy on Xbox Live Indie Games, Vblank's development of a compelling NES/GTA homage with Retro City Rampage, Copenhagen Game Collective's approach on "making the monitor the mediator" with IGF finalist B.U.T.T.O.N., and Nonchalance's Jejune Institute ARG, "the best real-world game you've never played, happening right underneath our noses".

In another new lecture, Thirion, creator of 2009 Independent Games Festival Mobile finalist Eliss and 2011 IGF finalist Faraway, will deliver a lecture on "Game Design By Accidents". He'll address how "coding has gradually become a fundamental instrument in every stage of video game creation, and how code is not just a tool to materialize an idea, but can also be the thing that invents the idea itself."

The full list of IGS lectures includes a plethora of high-profile already announced lectures, including Derek Yu and Andy Hull on the making of Spelunky XBLA, Wolfire's John Graham on creating the massively popular Humble Indie Bundles, plus Spyeart's Michael Todd on the unique subject of "Turning Depression into Inspiration".

Also previously added are Klei's Jamie Cheng on the journey to creating Shank, plus a detailed look at Drop7 success and plans for a sequel from Area/Code's Kevin Cancienne and Osmos co-creator Andy Nealen, as well as a practical lecture on long-term indie stability from Last Day Of Work's Arthur Humphrey (Virtual Villagers).

We realize that the Summit is a bit pricy for some indies, and we apologize. Since all the Summits are the same length and duration, and people move between them freely, it's really difficult for us - both technically and in terms of setting a precedent - to separate out a pass.

However, as happened last year, we try to help out. We're circulating some discount codes among IGF Main Competition entrants (look for an email on that in the next day or so), as well as some other key indie scene lists/folks.

If you really want to attend, and an IGS discount would make a difference between you coming or not, ping me at sc at simoncarless dot com and I'll try to see if we have any codes left (IGF entrants take precedent.)

Also, I'll probably post again when the final lectures are confirmed, there's at least a couple more to go! Thanks all - and particularly to Brandon Boyer, Matthew Wegner, and Steve Swink for working with me on the program.

Really hope to see you there and/or at the IGF Pavilion/Awards, which are easily accessible with an Expo Pass, of course...

Simon@IGF/IGS/etc.

The Student Showcase finalists are announced on Monday morning (10th) at 7am PT - so watch out for that, whoever asked.

In addition, the detailed rules have a short definition of each prize, and while I know people are looking at 'influential' right now because they found it mentioned in some text, the formal definition which the jury is told for the Grand Prize is actually:

"Seumas McNally Grand Prize: This Category is open to all Entered Games. Nominations will be based on the overall innovation [and/or] quality [and/or] impressiveness [and/or] enjoyability of each Entered Game."

We're continually tweaking the definitions, but in some kind of subjective manner, the Grand Prize is definitely meant to be 'the game you liked the best'.

this is why there were juries. Minecraft IS incredibly complex technically, though I don't expect anyone who isn't a programmer to truly appreciate it.

Oh, and it's worth noting that we actually got written statements from all of the coders of the Technical nominees that got multiple recommendations, because the jury (of coders!) wanted to know exactly what the programmers of the games thought was impressive under the hood. This was Ron Carmel's idea, and a good one.

I mean, did you guys nominate because it's Cave Story and because you were uncomfortable nominating it for Grand Prize? Did you!?

Again, look at how we did things this year. There's a standalone Visual Art jury comprised solely of artists - http://igf.com/2010/12/2011_independent_games_festiva_5.html - who independently nominated that prize. A completely separate set of indie smartalecs did the Grand Prize nominations (with an overlap of two or three people).

So I think all these kind of 'mental trade-off' concepts are pretty much disprovable with our newest voting scheme, woo.

But get for example some random game that noone ever heard from Africa... Unless it is 10 times better than any other games, it won't get nominated for anything, and will be played only by the judges that mandatorily had to play it (each judge receive a set of games to play, and they can play others if wanted, obviously lots of judges would play Super Crate Box, Bit.Trip, etc... but no judge would play that unknown african game).

Just so everyone understands how the judging process went this year - we _did_ allow the main set of judges to play and recommend games outside of their allotted set this year. It's certainly true that in the initial judging phase, games that people have heard of (and are also good!) might have got more 'recommendations'.

However, the smaller award-specific juries then took a close look at basically any games that had more than one recommendation - and in many cases went down into the single recommendations. These games had a pretty much level playing field - the voting starts from scratch.

So it meant that the most-recommended games were certainly NOT necessarily the finalists, and I definitely saw correction for that possible bias in the second stage. You just had to have your allotted judges in the first stage dig your game. Even if you had a great game that nobody had EVER heard of before, you can still be nominated. So... that's our fix for that.

Ta!
Simon@IGF.

There exist other festivals with broader categories of award. See: IndieCade.

Exactly! I may be one of the people who help to run the IGF, but we've been saying for a long time that we want people to pay more attention to other indie game awards (like PAX 10 or Indiecade) because we can't possibly be everything to everyone.

If you check out Indiecade - which only _just_ finished and anyone is also welcome to enter - they had 16 awards in much more of a juried film festival type way, with much more abstract, less empirically judged categories:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/30887/A_Slow_Year_Continuity_And_More_Honored_At_IndieCade.php

So if that's your kind of thing, that's great - just don't ignore the other indie fests and competitions, fixate on IGF, and then complain it's not doing what you want when some of the other events are. (Not that I'm saying that's entirely what's happening here, but...)

I will add that we'll be giving 'honorable mentions' in all categories this year, in addition to finalists (we did this in only some categories last year). So that will actually mean that we have a _lot_ of games mentioned - because we know that's important.

Simon (Chairman Emeritus)

Edmund and Tommy gave some interesting insight on this matter in the Indiegames podcast. They talked about how multiple judges came to them after the last IGF and told them they would have voted for SMB but thought Monaco needed it more since Ed and Tommy already had a publishing deal.

Well, we ask judges to vote for the games they think are the best, not the games that don't have publishing deals that they think are the best. Soo... 

We'll be debuting the full list of Main Competition entrants on Thursday morning PT, so watch out for that. It's not _quite_ as many as you see on the #s when you enter or the FTP site, because some of those are Student Showcase entries. But it's still a fair amount! We're still deduping so we don't know exact #s yet.

Anyhow, it's nice this year because almost everyone has a screenshot or video, so it's easy to check out many of the titles at a glance. More on Thursday, and thanks to everyone in the thread who entered.

Simon (IGF Chairman Emeritus and still hovering over the process.)

Not sure if Jason is around to explain himself, but I'm pretty sure that these games are coming to DSiWare purely because other people - particularly folks like Patrick Dugan, aka the99th on PlayThisThing, who was at Sabarasa at one point - were enthusiastic about it.

So I don't think there's any tactics here - they probably asked, and he said yes. Maybe there's a question about portfolio management here if people are now presuming he has a grand strategy

Ahem, there's a third North American GDC in the middle, guys (GDC Online/Austin, in October). But OK, it's not all the way right!

Also, please don't reference VGMWatch (at least, not the post-Kyle Orland version) as 'proof' that game journalists are all on the make, it's got crazy, EXTREMELY suspect sock puppet-y masters, as I discussed on GameSetWatch a couple of years back:

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2007/10/vgmwatch_who_watches_the_watch.php

Just posted this - expecting most of you know about these things, but there's some new things worth pointing out. Particularly, we've now announced speakers for the last-minute EGW replacement (Nuovo Sessions) in the Main Conference:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/27444/GDC_2010_Rounds_Off_Indie_Coverage_With_Indie_Fund_Talk_Gamma_Nuovo_Sessions.php

Game Developers Conference organizers have confirmed the final set of independent game-specific content, including Ron Carmel on the just-debuted Indie Fund, the Gamma IV party/showcase, and the EGW-replacing Nuovo Sessions game showcase.

The newly confirmed details round off a multitude of independent game-specific content at the March 9th-13th event, held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, including the 12th Annual Independent Games Festival -- featuring over 30 top indie games playable on the GDC Expo floor from Thursday 11th to Saturday 13th, as well as the major IGF Awards on Thursday 11th at 6.30pm.

In addition, the 4th Independent Games Summit on Tuesday 9th and Wednesday 10th has added and clarified a number of sessions, with 2D Boy's Ron Carmel kicking off the event with 'Indies and Publishers: Fixing a System That Never Worked', now confirmed to discuss the new Indie Fund organization.

Another major new panel, 'Tripping The Art Fantastic', features Spelunky creator Derek Yu, Braid artist David Hellman and Super Meat Boy co-creator Edmund McMillen discussing "how each one of these figures influences the state of game art, from hand painted epics to short form experimental Flash games."

Other previously unhighlighted Independent Games Summit lectures and panels include a trio on 'Savvy Indie Solutions to Difficult Development Problems', with Monaco's Andy Schatz, Canabalt's Adam Saltsman and Aquaria's Alec Holowka weighing in on "three unique approaches to game design" focusing on smaller as better -- alongside a number of other major lectures.

Also newly announced on Wednesday is a special GDC Mobile/Handheld session named 'IGF Mobile Showcase', with some of the category winners from the Independent Games Festival Mobile competition discussing the work behind their award-winning iPhone and Nintendo DSi titles - including Lilt Line, Glow Artisan and Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor.

There's also a notable off-site party in the indie space, and open to all GDC attendees. In the evening of March 10th, a host of notable independent studios are banding together to present the Gamma IV One Button Event, a party featuring six 'one button games' picked from over 150 entries to Kokoromi's game challenge, plus music from Baiyon, Starpause, and more. The chosen Gamma IV games will then appear in playable form at a special Pavilion on the GDC Expo Floor from March 11th-13th.

Finally, with the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at the GDC Main Conference being cancelled at short notice, IGF co-organizers Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink have stepped in to the same time slot to present 'The Nuovo Sessions'. This is "a look at some of the new, alternative games and game concepts nominated for the Independent Games Festival's Nuovo Awards, along with prototypes and productions from like-minded individuals."

Confirmed speakers for the session include Daniel Benmergui (Today I Die), Alex Bruce (Hazard: The Journey Of Life), Ian Bogost (A Slow Year), Farbs (Captain Forever, pictured), Cactus (Tuning), Steve Swink (Shadow Physics), Ian Dallas (The Unfinished Swan), Tyler Glaiel & Jon Schubbe (Closure), Terry Cavanagh (VVVVVV), and Justin Smith (Enviro-Bear 2000), who will be showing existing titles, new prototypes, and discussing multiple ways to create video games that think different.

Thanks for playing along at home...

Simon@GDC/IGF