A Look at the Independent Games Festival

GameDailyBiz has a look at the whys and wherefors behind next week's Independent Games Festival. The yearly celebration of independent games is compared by the article to the Sundance Film Festival, and the kind of exposure that gathering has provided to smaller film makers. From the article: "One of the earliest entrants in the IGF, Vicarious Visions, went on to create major games such as Spider-Man 2 for handhelds for Activision. In addition, last year's multi-award winner, online puzzle game Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, has got almost 10,000 subscribers, each paying $10 a month to keep playing, and is now being published by UbiSoft in a retail version..." The quote is from Simon Carless, co-chair of the IGF and editor of Game Developer Magazine. (As well as the first and fabulous Slashdot Games editor.)

Entrants

[joeljkp]

Here's the list [igf.com] of entrants for the 2005 festival.

If you want to try any out, start with Alien Hominid [alienhominid.com]. It's a great side-scroller that they've ported to PS2 and GameCube.

Too bad they don't tell which games work on which platforms, though. I'm always looking for some new Linux games.

Re:Entrants

[BinaryOpty]

Check out the main page [igf.com] for the 2005 finalists (12.10.04 newspost), and the Student Showcase winners (01.21.05 newspost).

Off hand, I do know that the DigiPen-developed Scavenger Hunt [igf.com] is cross platform, but that's all I know for sure.

Darwinia

[TrippTDF]

I've only played the demo, but expect this one to turn a few heads in 2005.

Re:Darwinia

[the phantom]

Darwinia is a great game. If you have only played the demo, you should buy it. Now. What are you waiting for? xander

Re:Darwinia

[kafka47]

They're waiting for the link. :-)

Darwinia Demo [darwinia.co.uk]

/Kafka

Re:Darwinia

[KDR_11k]

So, um, where's the greatness buried in that game? In the full version? Because the demo was pretty dull, repetitive and stupid. Build squad, move to enemy, hold fire until enemy dead, send in the engineers for the cleanup, repeat.

Not trolling, I really don't get it.

Re:Darwinia

[the phantom]

There is more later in the game. The demo is a bit limited.

xander

Dark Horizons Lore

[FozzieCDN]

Lore is a cross-platform game that supports Linux, Windows, OSX and Lindows and was recently listed one of the top 10 items of the recent Linux Desktop Summit by both organizers [linspire.com] and attendees alike [slashdot.org] .

The version that was demonstrated at the Linux Desktop Summit will be out on the 18th of March if you want to wait for a demo. But as an added bonus any current Retail user can gain access to the release simply by asking the developers!

Seriously check it out, its a good game that is turning a lot of heads an

Puzzle Pirates growth, pay-for-play

[wgnorm]

Although I'm not sure the exact numbers, Puzzle Pirates [puzzlepirates.com] was near 10,000 players a while ago and has probably far surpassed that now.

In fact they recently launched two new oceans (servers) to handle additional players. One of these servers runs off a different business model that allows unlimited play time but where you actually pay real dollars for additional game features (buying a ship, getting promoted, etc). It's a great experiment and has already worked well for people who like playing the puzzles but