As per the usual, the majority of the excitement coming out of GDC stems from the life and energy of the Independent Games Festival. It's a menagerie of clever ideas executed with a polish and precision some established game studios even have a hard time hitting. Made with love and passion--and a desire to win the $20,000 grand prize--the IGF showcases the best of the best in this generations' indie development community.
We start out by crawling the IGF with Phil Fish, one of the winners of last year's IGF competition for his upcoming game Fez and a judge in this year's competition. It must have been tough to pick a winner! After you watch our show, you'll see why. Amongst the games he had to choose from:
TAG: The Power of Paint. A unique, FPS puzzler where the colors of paint you spray on the surfaces of the environment cause your character to run, jump, and climb walls to reach your destination.
The Unfinished Swan. Again, a paint or ink metaphor where you being in an entirely white world and must splatter black ink around in order to reveal the geometry through which you must navigate.
Cortex Commabnd. In intensely complex, real-time game of programmable bots and war machines. Highly customizable and backed up by eight years of development, this is one to watch.
Feist. As beautiful as they come, it's a charming side-scroller reminiscent of a Miyazaki film. It has to be seen to be believed.
Blueberry Garden won the Seamus McNally Grand Prize at the IGF netting the creator, Erik Svedäng $30,000 (Mountain Dew popped on an extra $10k) to finish up his delightful project. Exploration and discovery are the themes here and let's hope that cash is put to good use to getting the final game out the door.
We also need to thank Attract Mode for throwing a video game art party where art inspired by and on the subject of video games is featured prominently in the Giant Robot store/gallery here in San Francisco. The event featured pairings of Giant Robot artists with indie game makers to create some bizarre and downright inspired projects in rapid-time. In the case of Cactus, that same day! There were four featured games at the event, but we don't want to spoil it by spilling the beans here. Give it a look-see! We think you'll be as impressed as we were!
Next week it will be back to, more-or-less, business as usual as we find some great DS games you may have overlooked and drop some final bits of indie-scene arcana into your repertoire of gaming knowledge.
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