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.

Not much interest?

[Dr.Opveter]

All the nominees this year were top notch ideas, and the winners deserved every moment in the spot light.
If slashdot comments count for anything i'd say the spot light is broke.

Re:Not much interest?

[RootsLINUX]

Well if you notice most of the Games articles have very little commenting relative to the others. My theory is that the majority of slashdotters are too busy with programming/hacking/IT/other_tech_field to play games, much less find the time to discuss them.

Unfortunately I'm one of those deprived individuals. =/

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.

Re:Darwinia is really good...

[Ford Prefect]

Heh. Anyone would reckon we were astroturfing [slashdot.org], but we're not!

At least I'm not, anyway... ;-)

As for different platforms, the Linux binary will apparently be a free download compatible with the Windows data files, and there's also a full, commercial port to the Mac being done by Ambrosia Software [ambrosiasw.com].

Sadly, no news of any port of the game to a stand-alone Protologic 68000, assuming anyone still has one of those peculiar machines in working order...

Re:Darwinia is really good...

[Malor]

Well, if I'm an astroturfer [wikipedia.org], I think I wasted a bit too much time establishing my credentials. This will be my 646th counted post, and I was here before they started archiving (and counting) stuff. :-) Heck, I remember when they started the newfangled User IDs, and didn't bother signing up for one for months. Stupid me. :-)

I don't think Introversion is exactly swimming in money to hire turfers anyway, they got stiffed badly by their old distributor. If this were Sony, and I was pushing Katamari Damacy a

Re:Darwinia is really good...

[ogonek]

Darwinia was just finished ( or perhaps isn't even totally finished), so it wasn't even among the entries, so you can take a guess why it wasn't among the finalists either.

I think Malor just wanted to mention another indie game that wasn't in the festival but still despite this (*gasp*) is a good game.

Re:Darwinia is really good...

[ogonek]

I don't think the guys who made Darwinia don't like the IGF, the game wasn't finished in time to enter in the 2005 competition.

With any luck they'll enter the 2006 competition.

at least one

[BinLadenMyHero]

Looks like the only one (besides Gish, which I already knew) that runs on linux is N [harveycartel.org].

And why don't you put the damn links to the games?

Re:at least one

[duncangough]

The feverish rush to post a story ahead of the hordes of other people doing so (in anticipation of imminent failure)...

Links to the games:

[mindaktiviti]

Global Defense Network [evertt.com]

Wik and the Fable of Souls [wikgame.com]

Rocketbowl [largeanimal.com]

N [harveycartel.org]

http://www.steermadness.com/ [steermadness.com]
Alien Hominid [alienhominid.com]

Gish [chroniclogic.com]

Protothea [protothea.com.ar]

Star Chamber

[dommer2029]

Got nothing. Bummer.

Actually, I think of it more as a computerized board game than an arcade game. Most of the other entries (okay, I've only actually looked at Gish and Wik) seem to fit better into a traditional genre ("Platformer" for those two).

N - Best game ever.

[BlueCup]

I've been playing N since 1.2 (longer ago than it might seem) I'm so glad they got something. I've played that game more than any other game, and have been anticipating 1.4 more than I anticipated Half Life 2 or Doom 3. It may not be all that graphically impressive, or technically impressive, but it's got the fun factor nailed down.