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The 2010 Independent Games Festival Mobile, an event that celebrates excellence in games for Apple's iPhone, other cellphone and smartphone operating systems (OS), Nintendo DS, Sony PlayStation Portable, and other handheld devices, has named the finalists for its third annual competition, with a host of outstanding portable titles showcased this year.
This year's IGF Mobile marks a record number of entries with 170 titles submitted for the competition, up nearly 65 percent from last year's total, which itself was double over the previous year. The finalists for IGF Mobile will compete for $5,000 in prizes, including specialized awards for art, design, audio, technical prowess, and iPhone game creation, as well as the IGF Mobile Best Game award.
Some of the notable titles nominated for this year's IGF Mobile Awards include iPhone games such as double nominee, Tiger Style's Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor, downloadable games for Nintendo's DSi including Powerhead Games' Glow Artisan, and promising titles from a host of worldwide indie developers, from England's Studio FungFung through Finland's Secret Exit and beyond.
This year, overall winners in each category will be announced on Feb. 8, 2010, with the category winners receiving $500 in prizes, a place as an overall IGF Mobile Best Game finalist, and the opportunity to showcase their mobile game at the IGF Pavilion during Game Developers Conference 2010 in San Francisco this March.
In addition, all finalists for 2010's IGF Mobile competition -- whether category winners or not -- will receive one All-Access pass to attend GDC 2010 and attend the multiple mobile-specific Summits there, including the GDC Mobile/Handheld Summit and the iPhone Games Summit. (The IGF Mobile judges have also named three games in each category as 'honorable mentions' which - while not quite making it to become a finalist this year - are commended as some of the most intriguing and high quality independent mobile games of the year.)
The full list of finalists and honorable mentions for the 2010 IGF Mobile competition are:

GDC 2010 organizers have revealed an initial set of Independent Games Summit talks for the March event, including notable lectures by Ron Carmel (World Of Goo) and Randy Smith (Spider).
The summit, now in its fourth year and taking place on March 9th-10th during Game Developers Conference 2010 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, features lectures, postmortems and roundtables from some of the most notable independent game creators -- including many former and current Independent Games Festival finalists and winners.
Overall, the 2010 Independent Games Summit "seeks to highlight the brightest and the best of indie development, with discussions ranging from game design philosophy, distribution, business, marketing, and much more."
Advisors for the Summit include Independent Games Festival chairman Simon Carless and independent developers such as Flashbang Studios founder Matthew Wegner (Off-Road-Velociraptor Safari), as well as colleague Steve Swink (Shadow Physics).
With a final set of lectures to be announced soon, a number of major talks have been revealed on the Summit homepage. Highlights include the following:
- Indies and Publishers: Fixing a System That Never Worked
In IGS 2010's kickoff talk, 2D Boy co-founder Ron Carmel (World Of Goo) will discuss "the problems with the current model (a tenant farming ecosystem built upon a weak security model), contrast how Valve and Microsoft deal with developers, and propose that creating more transparency in the game industry will give rise to a healthy model for developers and publishers/distributors to work together."
- Increasing Our Reach: Designing To Grab and Retain Players
During his keynote talk, Looking Glass Studios veteran and Steven Spielberg collaborator Randy Smith (Thief) will talkk about the design concepts behind 'immediacy with depth', as applied to his recent iPhone hit Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor. He notes: "The indie games movement should be the wellspring of daring and innovative ideas, but we need a sizable and devoted audience to help us realize that potential. How do we reach more players? Is there something we’re doing wrong?", and vows to look at design solutions.

The organizers of Game Developers Conference 2010 have revealed major Programming Track talks for the March 9th-13th event, including lectures on God Of War III, Splinter Cell: Conviction, Starcraft II, Uncharted 2 and more.
The announcements continue a set of GDC 2010 track-specific announcements, this one focusing on the Programming Track, which "focuses on these challenges and the opportunities presented by next and current generation development including: mature consoles, new handhelds, a highly competitive sales environment, and increased demand for very high production values in games."
The subset of the Game Developers Conference 2010 Advisory Board tasked with programming this track include major industry figures such as Bungie's Chris Butcher, industry veteran Mark Cerny, and former EA fellow Chris Hecker.
Some of the highlighted Programming lectures just announced for the San Francisco Moscone Center-based event include the following:
- Shadows In God of War III
This lecture, conducted by SCEA's Ben Diamand, "provides a detailed view of Sony Santa Monica's approach to shadows in its upcoming title, God of War III. It covers the general techniques employed, and a variety of specific details about what features were supported and what tradeoffs were made."
- Designing for Performance, Scalability & Reliability: StarCraft II's Approach
Blizzard's Dominic Filion will present a detailed lecture "on how Blizzard approached engine development on StarCraft II, centering on aspects of developments that are central to Blizzard's philosophy: scalability, performance and robustness. Lessons learned throughout StarCraft II's development will be demonstrated and a variety of techniques to handle these issues will be presented."

Think Services' Game Developers Conference Canada will be returning for its second year this May, offering lectures and networking opportunities focused on the burgeoning Canadian development scene.
Registration is now open for the event at the official GDC Canada website. The event will be taking place at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC from May 6-7 2010.

The 2010 Game Developers Choice Awards, the highest honors in video game development, has named Valve co-founder Gabe Newell as the winner of this year's Pioneer Award, with Newell to be honored in-person at GDC 2010 in San Francisco this March.
The Pioneer Award was originated by the Game Developers Choice Awards organizers at the 2008 Awards, is presented at Game Developers Conference each year, and was the first award to honor breakthrough figures in the game industry. It celebrates those individuals responsible for developing a vital technology or game design at a crucial juncture in video game history, paving the way for the many who followed them.
This year, the Choice Awards Advisory Committee, which includes notables such as Ben Cousins (EA DICE), Harvey Smith (Arkane), Raph Koster (Metaplace), John Vechey (PopCap), Ray Muzyka (BioWare), Clint Hocking (Ubisoft), and others voted to give the Pioneer Award to Valve's Newell.
He is being awarded for his work in co-creating PC key digital download service Steam, and helping to make possible some of the most important video games of the past two decades -- from the Half-Life series through Portal to Team Fortress and beyond.

[In her latest Bosslady Blog update, Game Developers Conference event director Meggan Scavio fills attendees in this year's new summits and some changes to the 2010 event.]
Now that my calendar reads 2010, I can officially start the “Countdown to GDC.” It goes a little something like this:
1. Find March 9th on my laminated wall calendar
2. Count the weeks back until I reach the current week.
3. Curse out loud
4. Start a list of all the things yet to do
5. Break into a light sweat.
One of the items on my to-do list is to talk a little bit about what we’ve been up to here at GDC headquarters - besides being excited about the Independent Games Festival Nominees while also being inflamed about Spider-Man 4. Inflamed!
When not already missing Sam Raimi even though Spider-Man 3 was awful, we’re surprisingly productive.
Some of you may have seen the announcement of the newly-formed iPhone Summit taking place March 9-10. Focusing on both the technical and business aspects of developing games for the platform, the iPhone Summit at GDC 2010 will run 1050m before hitting a wall and tumbling to a Canabalt postmortem.
To avoid tumbling to your death, there will also be a session on knowing what you’re signing by understanding the iPhone contract along with how to capture the female iPhone gamer (hint: hot vampires.) The iPhone Summit program is coming together quite nicely, and I suspect there will be more good stuff to announce in that department soon.