Latest News

The Independent Games Festival (IGF) juries have announced their Main Competition finalists for the 14^th annual presentation of its awards, celebrating the brightest creatives and the most influential game designs to come out of the independent community in the past year.
This year's finalists for the most prestigious indie game awards, each picked by a discipline-specific set of expert juries after recommendations from almost 200 top independent game experts, are led by multiple nominations for several standout titles.
These include thechineseroom's experimental first person game Dear Esther -- picking up nominations for Visual Art and Audio, as well as the Nuovo Award and Seumas McNally Grand Prize -- and Mossmouth's procedurally generated platformer Spelunky, which was nominated for the Design and Technical Awards on top of a nod for the Grand Prize.
Other multiple-nominated titles include Polytron's highly anticipated puzzle adventure Fez, Mode 7's turn based tactical shooter Frozen Synapse, and Die Gute Fabrik's digitally-enabled folk game Johann Sebastian Joust, all of which saw nominations for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize on top of nominations for Technical Excellence, Excellence in Design, and the Nuovo Award, respectively.
The Nuovo Award, once again honoring 'abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development' of all kinds, also saw some standout games in addition to some of the above titles among its eight nominees for the $5,000 prize. These include Bennett Foddy's fiendish climbing game GIRP, Daniel Benmergui's evocative title Storyteller, and Terry Cavanagh's two-player puzzle title At A Distance.
Now in its second year fully integrated into the IGF Main Competition, the Best Mobile Game Award saw nominations for Tiger Style's sci-fi action gardening game Waking Mars -- also up for an Excellence in Audio award -- Simogo's rhythm-stealth game Beat Sneak Bandit, Steph Thirion's constellation-crafter Faraway, Powerhead's color-puzzler ASYNC Corp, and Vlambeer's fishing/shooter Ridiculous Fishing.
All finalist games will be playable at the IGF Pavilion on the Game Developers Conference 2012 Expo floor from March 7-9, 2012, at San Francisco's Moscone Center, as part of a week of independent game-related content that also includes the Independent Games Summit (March 5th-6^th), and the IGF Awards ceremony itself.
The IGF Awards, where this year's IGF winners will be unveiled, will be held on the evening of March 7, alongside the Game Developers Choice Awards. IGF award recipients will receive $60,000 of prizes in various categories, including the $30,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize.
The full list of finalists for the 2012 Independent Games Festival, with jury-picked "honorable mentions" to those top-quality games that didn't quite make it to finalist status, is as follows:

Organizers of the 2012 Game Developers Conference have debuted a trio of new talks in the show's Artificial Intelligence Summit, spanning games from Thief 4 through Double Fine's Happy Action Theater to Hitman: Absolution and beyond.

The talks are part of a new set of AI Summit announcements featuring a look at some esoteric AI techniques, some examples of animation-driven locomotion, and how developers are making virtual characters more socially engaging.

The GDC Summits will take place Monday, March 5 through Tuesday, March 6, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and will offer specialized looks into emerging or otherwise influential sectors of the games industry.

This year, GDC will feature a total of eight Summits, with topics including AI, Localization, Education, Independent Games, Smartphone & Tablet Games, and Social & Online Games -- new to the show this year are the Game IT Summit and Games for Change @ GDC.

The latest sessions to be added to the event's AI Summit, held on the Monday and Tuesday of the show, include the following:

- More often than not, we think of AI as a series of tools that help virtual characters take action. In "Off the Beaten Path: Non-Traditional Uses of AI," however, developers will explain how they leverage AI in some unusual, yet beneficial ways.

During this session, Michael Robbins of Gas Powered Games will explain how he used neural networks to drive tactical decision making in Supreme Commander 2, Double Fine's Chris Jurney will detail some vision-based tricks for the studio's Kinect-based Happy Action Theater (pictured), and Havok's Ben Sunshine-Hill will outline how AI can help adjust level of detail to best suit a player's needs.

- With games becoming more and more visually detailed, even the simplest animations need to become more nuanced and complex. "Animation Driven Locomotion for Smoother Navigation" will help address this issue by detailing how developers can use animation as a tool for more realistic pathfinding.

Using examples from games like Hitman: Absolution, Thief 4, and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, IO Interactive's Bobby Anguelov, Eidos Montreal's Gabriel Leblanc, and Big Huge Games' Shawn Harris will show off methods for using animation to improve the way game characters navigate virtual space.

This week, Game Developers Conference 2012 has announced three new Main Conference talks, featuring a panel on the indie renaissance, a look at emerging technology trends, and a breakdown of the tech pipeline for Assassin's Creed.

The 26th GDC show will take place Monday, March 5 through Friday, March 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and the Main Conference (March 7th-9th) offers six tracks covering key disciplines in the games industry, including Audio, Business, Marketing & Management, Game Design, Production, Programming, and Visual Arts.

The following lectures are the newest highlights for GDC 2012's Main Conference:

- The Business, Marketing & Management track is revealing a signature panel, "Back to the Garage: The Return of Indie Development," featuring industry notables including Epic founder Tim Sweeney, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner, Canabalt developer Adam Saltsman, Mojang's Markus "Notch" Persson, with moderator, UCSC's associate director of the Center for Games and Playable Media, Jane Pinckard.

Drawing from their varied and prolific careers in the game industry, these panelists will examine the explosive growth of small-scale and indie game development. Each of them will use their prodigious experience to discuss key indie opportunities and risks, "while offering advice on how to make the most of digital distribution, new platforms, and much more."

- Elsewhere, in a key talk in the show's Programming track, Square Enix's global CTO Julien Merceron will host "Designing a Technology Strategy for a Large Publisher." Merceron, drawing from his experience working at Ubisoft, Eidos, and now Square Enix, will explain how developers need to tailor their technology to support the varying needs, strengths, and weaknesses of major publishers.

Merceron, who oversees technology across the entire merged entity of Square Enix and Eidos, including franchises from Final Fantasy through Tomb Raider and Deus Ex, will outline how a company's technology alters its approach to internal development, and will point to emerging trends developers should be aware of.

This week, GDC 2012 has revealed three notable Main Conference sessions, featuring Valve on dynamic dialog systems, Double Fine on kid-friendly design, and Rocksteady on the soundtrack for Batman: Arkham City.

The 26th GDC show will take place Monday, March 5 through Friday, March 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and the Main Conference (March 7th-9th) offers six tracks covering key disciplines in the games industry, including Audio, Business, Marketing & Management, Game Design, Production, Programming, and Visual Arts.

The following lectures are the newest highlights for GDC 2012's Main Conference:

- In the Programming track, Valve's Elan Ruskin will break down the process the studio uses to create dynamic and responsive dialog systems in games like Left 4 Dead. The talk, dubbed, "AI-driven Dynamic Dialog through Fuzzy Pattern Matching. Empower Your Writers!", will delve into the mechanisms used to track thousands of possible scenarios and ensure that in-game characters always react appropriately.

Ruskin will also detail how this system allows writers to easily edit and add new lines of dialog without putting a heavy burden on the studio's programmers.

- Over in the Design track, Double Fine project lead Nathan Martz will host "Fun for Everyone: Lessons in Accessible Design from Sesame Street: Once Upon A Monster." Looking back on the studio's recent Kinect-based children's game, Martz will explore how to best introduce mechanics and teach players about a game, even if it's the first one they've ever played.

- Finally, the Audio track will feature a Rocksteady-led lecture on composing the score for the studio's highly-acclaimed Batman sequel. In the talk, "Composition Process in Batman: Arkham City," audio director and composer Nick Arundel will offer some tips for composing a score that remains cohesive and fresh, even over the course of a 20 hour game. In addition, Arundel will look beyond Arkham City to examine whether formal musical development has a place within the game industry at large.

In addition to the above sessions, GDC organizers recently added new Main Conference talks covering the visual effects in Gears of War 3, a breakdown of our psychological need to play, and Ninja Theory's approach to motion capture. Show organizers have also announced new Summit talks featuring a look at the localization of StarCraft II, a talk from Triple Town creator Daniel Cook, and a series of mini AI lectures.

GDC 2012 organizers have announced a trio of new Summit talks for the upcoming show, examining the localization of StarCraft II, new online game genres, and the AI in titles like Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, The Darkness II, and Skulls of the Shogun.

The GDC Summits will take place Monday, March 5 through Tuesday, March 6, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and will offer specialized looks into emerging or otherwise influential sectors of the games industry.

The latest sessions and lectures to be featured at the GDC 2012 Summits include the following:

- As a lead talk in the Localization Summit, Blizzard's senior manager of platform services, William Barnes, will host "StarCraft II - Carte Blanche Localization," offering a detailed overview of how Blizzard brought its newest RTS to a global audience.

Barnes will point to a number of anecdotes from "the amazing roller coaster ride that was the localization of StarCraft II" (pictured) to explain why comprehensive localization went a long way toward helping the game achieve worldwide success.

- Over in the packed multi-track Social & Online Games Summit, Triple Town co-creator Daniel Cook of Panda Poet developer Spry Fox will provocatively detail what it takes to carve out a new genre with an online game.

The talk, dubbed "Create New Genres (and Stop Wasting Your Life in the Clone Factories)," will encourage developers to seek out new and unexplored realms of persistent online game design, while simultaneously offering advice to protect new ideas from copycats and 'fast followers'.

- Finally, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Summit has announced its first sessions, starting with "AI Postmortems: Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, The Darkness II and Skulls of the Shogun" -- featuring a trio of industry veterans as they reflect on the challenges and lessons learned during the development of three soon-to-be-released games.

Here, 38 Studios' Michael Dawe, Digital Extremes' Daniel Brewer, and Haunted Temple's Borut Pfeifer will each pick apart their respective titles, and offer insight on some modern challenges AI programmers should be aware of.

This week, Game Developers Conferece 2012 is revealing a trio of notable new sessions, including the first Western appearance of Space Invaders Infinity Gene and Groove Coaster's creator, product ownership as it relates to Dragon Age, and the music behind Journey and Monaco.

The 26th GDC show will take place Monday, March 5 through Friday, March 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and the Main Conference (March 7th-9th) offers six tracks covering key disciplines in the games industry, including Audio, Business, Marketing & Management, Game Design, Production, Programming, and Visual Arts.

The following lectures are the newest additions to GDC 2012's Main Conference:

- In a Game Design track talk simultaneously translated from Japanese, Taito chief game designer Reisuke Ishida will make his first ever Western speaking appearance, discussing his two recent signature titles in a lecture called "Five Techniques for Making an Unforgettable Game, Illustrated in Space Invaders Infinity Gene and Groove Coaster."

Using the examples of Space Invaders Infinity Gene a stylish, well-received 30th anniversary update of the classic game, and Groove Coaster a popular iOS exclusive music title, Ishida will explore the best ways to make a game stand out, even in the overcrowded market.

- Also added in the Production track is a talk dubbed "Ownership - Dragon Age Style," in which BioWare's Adriana Lopez will explain what "ownership" means, organizationally, in the context of handling a major video game franchise.

Using BioWare's acclaimed Dragon Age role-playing game franchise as an example, Lopez will detail the responsibilities of product owners and how they can leverage their control over a franchise to better manage their projects and maintain a fully-engaged team.

- Finally, in the Audio track session "Journey vs Monaco: Music is Storytelling," composer Austin Wintory will contrast two different video game scores he wrote in 2011, for both thatgamecompany's Journey and Pocketwatch Games' IGF-winning Monaco.

Wintory will detail the ways these two games use music to create narrative arcs and reconcile adaptivity, while also going over the audio production processes for both titles. Near the end of the talk, thatgamecompany's Jenova Chen and Pocketwatch Games' Andy Schatz will join the session for an audience Q&A on the construction of the games' audio.