2007 IGF Finalists Announced

Gamasutra has the listing of the finalists for the 2007 Independent Games Festival. The 9th year of the event saw a strong turnout for contenders, with 141 entries into the field. From the article: "Nominations are led by Bit Blot's dreamlike, innovatively controlled 2D underwater adventure title Aquaria , which garnered 4 nominations, including one for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. According to a statement: 'Other Grand Prize nominees included Queasy Games' cleverly designed abstract shoot-em-up, Everyday Shooter , which grabbed 3 nominations in total — nominees for the top prize were rounded out by Peter Stock's intelligently complex physics puzzle game Armadillo Run /a>, Three Rings' Wild West indie strategy MMO Bang! Howdy , and Naked Sky's Xbox Live Arcade action-puzzler RoboBlitz ." In the interests of full disclosure, I was a judge for the first round of voting this year.

Derek & Alec

[Shabadage]

Everyone over at TIGSource is rooting for Aquaria (If we don't, Derek will hurt us).

I have an entry in the Student Showcase

[JNighthawk]

I was the Technical Lead (a.k.a. Guy-Who-Codes-Whatever-Needs-Coding) for Ultimate Fairy Battle. I did the networking and rendering code for it. For those that are wondering (doubt there are any), we used UDP for the networking and OpenGL with Corona for rendering. UFB is an entry in the IGF Student Showcase this year, go check it out! It's a multiplayer arena combat game where you play as a spellcasting fairy trying to rack up the most kills during a round. Full online/LAN support along with built-in bots. It's pretty fun.

And because I'm a huge proponent of data-driven design and logic, all of our spell logic is written in Lua and the spell data (damage, mana cost, etc.) is written in XML, so it allows whoever wants to run a server the ability to change the spells however they want.

good indy RPGs?

[GrumpySimon]

Hmm.. I had a quick look over, but can't see any good indy RPGs - anyone know of any?

Re:

[robaal]

Check out Mount and Blade: http://www.taleworlds.com/ [taleworlds.com] it's a work-in-progress and last time I checked there wasn't any story but the combat system was fun.

Re:

[GrumpySimon]

Cool - I'll check it out, thanks :)

Re:

[ynnaD]

The Underdogs runs a pretty exhaustive list of indie games, here [the-underdogs.info] is their list of RPGs. Unfortunately, there are a hell of a lot of rogue clones (which is great if that's what you're into) but not so much graphically pleasing stuff.

Re:

[camomilk]

I recommend Aveyond [amaranthia.com]. Fun old-school RPG with a 10 hour free trial.

Only Student Game

[rizzuh]

One game not mentioned in the post is the student project I worked on last year, Toblo [toblo.info]. Being a student project, it's totally free and is available for download right now. We're honored to be the only student project nominated in the main competition.

Re:

[JNighthawk]

Congrats, rizzuh. As I said in my above post, I also have an entry in the Student Showcase. Have AIM?

Re:

[rohlfinator]

Congrats on the nomination!

I just downloaded Toblo, and it's a blast. I need to convince some of my friends to get a LAN game going.
I have to ask, though: is there any chance of a map editor being released? Some community-created maps could give this game a ton of longevity.

Re:

[chiavelli]

Our map editor was Photoshop believe it or not. It's fairly simple to make Toblo maps as long as you know how. We'll keep bothering Zach to whip up a tutorial for you =)

Re:

[rohlfinator]

Hm, interesting... I'll be sure to keep an eye on it. Thanks!

Armadillo Run

[tabacco]

If you haven't tried Armadillo Run [armadillorun.com], I highly recommend it. Especially if you were ever a fan of The Incredible Machine.

Re:

[Stefanwulf]

Bang!Howdy seems to be cross-platform, with MS Windows, OSX, and Linux supported.

Re:

[kerecsen]

I agree, Armadillo Run is totally awesome. My other favorite IGF game is Tribal Trouble (http://tribaltrouble.com/). It's for the Settlers crowd, and for those who think Java is too slow to do games :)

Slightly odd...

[The-Bus]

It's too bad that Aquaria doesn't have a demo or a playable game. If the game is finished, then they should release it. If it's not finished, what did the judges judge?

I also have to point out that if Bang! Hopwdy is anything like Three Ring's previous MMO, Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates it's going to be a lot of fun. It seems to be on the same economic model as the earlier game: free to play indefinitely, online and pay to get more features and do more stuff.

Finally, RoboBlitz is on the Xbox Live Arcade, but it's also on PC. The trial is available here [roboblitz.com]. The full game costs as much on the PC as it does on the Xbox: $15. I've played a couple of hours of it and it's a fun combination of an FPS, a platformer, and a physics-based puzzler.

It's nice to see these types of games get coverage on here.

Re:

[xzanthar]

you can get RoboBlitz off of Steam. Played it through, well done game.