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Erik Svedang's Blueberry Garden, a charming exploration game set in an ever-changing ecosystem, received top honors - the $30,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game - at the 2009 Independent Games Festival Awards.
The winners were announced this evening at the eleventh Annual IGF Awards ceremony, hosted by the Game Developers Conference at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.
The IGF awards are often referred to as the Sundance Festival of the video game industry, and offer both global exposure and over $50,000 in cash prizes to each year's winners.
Previous breakout IGF award-winners include titles such as Braid, Audiosurf, Castle Crashers, and World Of Goo, and this year's awards saw 226 Main Competition entries from all over the world - and over 450 entries in total.

Organizers of this month's Game Developers Conference have revealed notable, late-breaking new talks from Capcom' Yoshinori Ono on Street Fighter IV, MIT's David Merrill on new forms of interaction, and a panel of journalists-turned-developers on crossing over to another side of the industry.
Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono will present a talk called "IV Style: Returning to the Roots of a Fighting Game Classic," discussing how the Capcom team approached the design and development process of the anticipating fighting game -- and promising "a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse into the inner workings of Japanese development."

Following recent confusion, Game Developers Conference organizer Think Services has clarified that its conference in Shanghai this October is the only official GDC event scheduled for China -- despite an unrelated upcoming event going by "ChinaGDC."
Think Services (which publishes Gamasutra) has scheduled its GDC China for October 11 through 13 in Shanghai.
The unlicensed naming overlap has roots in a 2007 deal that saw Think Services work with IDG China for the first GDC China event, GDC executive director Meggan Scavio said in a statement:

Organizers of the 2009 Independent Games Festival (IGF) have launched the IGF Audience Award voting website, allowing game fans everywhere to download, play, and choose a favorite all of the eligible Main Competition finalist indie games which submitted a publicly playable demo.
Online voting is open now and continues through Friday, March 20th, with the award given out at the IGF Awards taking place alongside the Game Developers Choice Awards at the 2009 Game Developers Conference on March 25th.
The games with eligible demos or full versions on PC, XBLA, XNA Community Games or PSN are: Retro/Grade, Dyson, Brainpipe, The Maw, IncrediBots, Osmos, Musaic Box, Cortex Command, CarneyVale Showtime, Coil, The Graveyard, PixelJunk Eden, Mightier, You Have To Burn The Rope, and Between.

Organizers of next month's Game Developers Conference are continuing to add major talks, this time revealing a panel featuring ICO creator Fumito Ueda alongside Suda51 and Fallout 3's Emil Pagliarulo, plus DSi hardware lead Masato Kuwahara on making Nintendo's new handheld.
Firstly, in a newly revealed panel called 'Evolving Game Design: Today and Tomorrow, Eastern and Western Game Design', Sony's Fumito Ueda, creator of ICO and Shadow Of The Colossus, will be making a rare Western appearance to discuss the state of Western and Eastern game design.

Emil Pagliarulo, writer and lead designer for Bethesda's Fallout 3, will deliver a special interview-style keynote with Spike TV's Geoff Keighley keynote for the Game Career Seminar at the 2009 Game Developers Conference, taking place in San Francisco's Moscone Center from March 23 to 27, 2009.
Titled "Unlikely Beginnings: Fallout 3's Lead Designer on His Path into the Game Industry," the keynote will guide attendees through Pagliarulo's career path, from nearly becoming an elementary school teacher, to working as a game journalist and eventually to designing one of 2008's most critically-acclaimed games.
Discussing how professional networking, corporate ladder-climbing, and luck played in the designer's success, the special interview format will facilitate an engaging conversation on the trials and tribulations of a career in game development.

Organizers of the 2009 Game Developers Conference have extended early registration for the March 23rd-27th San Francisco-based event to Tuesday, February 17th due to public demand, with 30 percent discounts now only available until that date.
The extension gives interested attendees more time to sign up for the 2009 edition of the world's leading game industry conference, which includes a multitude of discipline-specific lecture tracks, focused sub-market summits, major keynotes, award shows, and more to attend this year.