2005 Independent Games Festival Winners

The Independent Games Festival is the opportunity during the GDC to recognize game developers from smaller efforts that don't have the big budgets and long development cycles of more commercial titles. All the nominees this year were top notch ideas, and the winners deserved every moment in the spot light. Read on for this year's winners.

Web/Download:

Innovation in Audio - Global Defense Network (Evertt.com)
Innovation in Visual Art - Wik and the Fable of Souls (Reflexive Entertainment)
Innovation in Technical Excellence - RocketBowl (Large Animal Games)
Innovation in Game Design - Wik and the Fable of Souls (Reflexive Entertainment)
Audience Choice Award - N (Metanet Software)
Seumas McNally Award - Wik and the Fable of Souls (Reflexive Entertainment)

Open Category:

Innovation in Audio - Steer Madness (Veggie Games)
Innovation in Visual Art - Alien Hominid (The Behemoth)
Innovation in Technical Excellence - Alien Hominid (The Behemoth)
Innovation in Game Design - Gish (Chronic Logic)
Audience Choice Award - Alien Hominid (The Behemoth)
Seumas McNally Award - Gish (Chronic Logic)

Cartoon Network Project Goldmaster Award -
Protothea (Digital Builders)

Commentary and images from the ceremony will be available later today. Something too nice not to share, though, came when one of the developers who stood up to receive the Seumas McNally Award for Gish asked his girlfriend to marry him on-stage. She said yes, of course.

Darwinia is really good...

[Malor]

Introversion, the folks that made Uplink, have just started shipping Darwinia. It seems really good so far. It's really hard to describe... it's one of the strangest games I've ever seen, but is really interesting.

You're in a 3-d world that has been overrun by viruses, and your goal seems to be to defeat the viruses and make the virtual world safe for Darwinians, which are little 2-d sprite thingies that move around in the 3-d world. The Darwinians are actually somewhat useful, in that they can operate machinery for you. They may be able to do more but I haven't gotten that far with it yet. (only got the game yesterday).

The whole metaphor of the game is that you are logged in and running programs and interacting with the world, and at first you can't run very many programs, and the programs you CAN run aren't terribly interesting.... so far I have Squad, which makes a troop of little soldiers you can blast the bad guys with, Engineer, which makes little guys that can activate buildings and collect the souls of dead things to spawn new Darwinians, and Officer, which converts a normal Darwinian into one you can control and use to give orders to the mobs of Darwinians that stand around the spawn machine. I don't know how many program types there will eventually be.

The graphic look reminds me a bit of that 3D Sentinel game from a few years ago. Monsters are fairly varied... so far I've seen (and fought) little crawly virus things, spiders, centipedes, floating egg laying thingies, and monster-spawning flowers.

It's very different, and very weird, and very fun, at least so far. These are the guys who made Uplink, which was fantastic, so it's likely to be good. You can get a demo at www.introversion.co.uk [introversion.co.uk].

There's a Linux version in the works, but at the moment it's Windows-only. And if you haven't played Uplink, check out the demo for that too. It's really good, and has a Linux version.