Anticipation is building for the 2025 Independent Games Festival Awards, and we've got the first round of jurors tasked with evaluating this year's outstanding selection of games.
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The first round of IGF judging is complete, and GDC 2025 is happy to introduce the first group of jurors for the 2025 IGF Awards. These game industry professionals, each a specialist in their respective fields, will play, evaluate, and assess the amazing group of games under consideration this year.
Here are the jurors who will be judging games in the Excellence in Audio Award, Excellence in Design Award, and the Excellence in Narrative Award categories, along with this year's nominated games:
Excellence in Audio
Anger Foot (Free Lives / Devolver Digital)
Despelote (Julián Cordero, Sebastian Valbuena / Panic)
INDIKA (Odd Meter / 11 bit studios)
ODDADA (Sven Ahlgrimm, Mathilde Hoffmann, Bastian Clausdorff)
Thank Goodness You're Here! (Coal Supper / Panic)
Utopia Must Fall (Pixeljam)
Maxi Boch: An independent game developer and sound designer, having notably crafted the BAFTA-winning sound design & music of Ape Out. Maxi was formerly an associate professor in game design at the NYU Game Center & served for over a decade at Harmonix Music Systems as a designer and creative director.
Simon Byron: Managing director of Yogscast Games and co-host of One Life Left, the world's longest-running video games radio show.
Samantha Kalman: The creator of music games Sentris and Echoic Memory. Her design work includes Apex Legends and Astroneer. She also makes sound art & noise music.
David Kanaga: A composer and game designer. His musical work includes interactive scores for games like Proteus, Dyad, and Panoramical, as well as non-interactive work like the 2022 podcast-opera Soft Valkyrie. His game designs include Oikospiel Book I, which won the IGF Nuovo Awad in 2017.
Juan Orjuela: A musician and game developer from Bogotá, Colombia, specializing in interactive composition and sound design for video games and experimental audiovisual installations. Juan is a co-founder of the independent game studio Ludopium.
Neha Patel: A freelance composer and sound designer from Québec. She has worked on titles such as Venba, Eternights, Six Ages 2 and more. Her music work is greatly influenced by her training in classical piano with an emphasis on nostalgic melodies. As a self-taught sound designer, Neha focuses on emotional sound design. She believes that good sound effects can not only be heard, but felt. When not creating audio, Neha is advocating for a sustainable game audio industry by talking about pay transparency, financial realities and game audio marketing.
Isaac Io Schankler: The composer for award-winning indie games like Ladykiller in a Bind, Analogue: A Hate Story, and the upcoming polyrhythm game The One-Body Problem. They are an associate professor of music at Cal Poly Pomona.
Excellence in Design
Balatro (LocalThunk / Playstack)
Blue Prince (Dogubomb / Raw Fury)
Caves of Qud (Freehold Games / Kitfox Games)
Consume Me (Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson, Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, Ken "coda" Snyder)
Pacific Drive (Ironwood Studios / Kepler Interactive)
Tactical Breach Wizards (Suspicious Developments)
Marina Diez: A Spanish award-winning emotional game designer, creative director, and filmmaker. She is currently game director and Head of Business Strategy at btf Games in Berlin, Germany.
Osama Dorias: Design director at Brass Lion Entertainment. In the past, he has worked at Blizzard, Warner Brothers, Ubisoft, and more. He has been teaching game design at Dawson College for the last 12 years, where he authored the Independent Game Design program. He is also one of three habibis on The Habibis podcast. Osama loves to give a voice to marginalized people and causes, and has hosted game jams, workshops, and other community activities, including co-founding the Polaris Game Design Retreat, a think-tank style conference inviting the industry’s top designers to solve the toughest problems in games.
Megan Fox: Queer af founder of Glass Bottom Games. BAFTA Breakthrough. Working on something mysterious (prev: SkateBIRD, Hot Tin Roof, etc).
Pietro Righi Riva: Co-founder and studio director at Santa Ragione where he worked on multiple award-winning independent games, such as MirrorMoon EP, FOTONICA, Wheels of Aurelia, and Saturnalia. His design philosophy aims to develop games that are not objective-driven and accessible to non-gamers. For the Triennale Milan Museum, he has curated the Triennale Game Collection volumes 1 & 2. He won the Innovation in Experience Design Award at IndieCade 2018 for his solo project Asta Grande. Righi Riva lives and works in Milan, Italy.
Kenny Sun: An independent game developer based in Brooklyn, NY. Since 2015, he has released a variety of projects ranging from simple mobile games to expansive roguelites.
Ben Wilson: An indie-turned-AAA-turned-indie again game maker from the UK who has worked with Sumo Digital, Die Gute Fabrik, and on several solo projects over the span of a decade. Outside of video games, Ben is a crossword constructor and amateur ceramicist.
Jenny Xu: A long-distance runner, fitness instructor, Forbes 30 Under 30: Games recipient, and CEO of Talofa Games. She started making games and running at age 12, and in her 14 years in the gaming industry, she’s shipped 10 titles on the mobile app stores with over 10-million downloads and raised over $6.3M of venture capital funding. She was the grand prize winner of the Niantic Beyond Reality Contest in 2019, right after she graduated from MIT studying Computer Science. She's also previously worked at Google, N3TWORK, and EA.
Excellence in Narrative
Caves of Qud (Freehold Games / Kitfox Games)
Closer the Distance (Osmotic Studios / Skybound Games)
Consume Me (Jenny Jiao Hsia, AP Thomson, Jie En Lee, Violet W-P, Ken "coda" Snyder)
Despelote (Julián Cordero, Sebastian Valbuena / Panic)
INDIKA (Odd Meter / 11 bit studios)
No Case Should Remain Unsolved (Somi)
Leena van Deventer: An award-winning narrative designer, writer, and producer working on indie horror roadtrip game Dead Static Drive. She taught interactive storytelling at various universities in Melbourne over seven years, and sits on the Board of the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation.
Meghna Jayanth: An award-winning narrative designer focused on subverting the capitalist-colonialist fantasies and pleasures that dominate the imaginaries of game design. Her most recent project is the critically acclaimed Thirsty Suitors, where you confront your hot but toxic exes in narrative combat and heal intergenerational immigrant trauma. Past work includes IGF Narrative winner and BAFTA-nominated 80 Days - for which she won a Writers' Guild of Great Britain award in 2015; fantastical coming-of-age adventure Sable, and contributions to Horizon: Zero Dawn, This War of Mine, Boyfriend Dungeon, Sunless Sea and more. She's currently working on All Will Rise, an inappropriately joyous game about power, possibility, and the impending ecological collapse of the world as we know it.
Darshana Jayemanne: Reader in Digital Cultures at Abertay University, UK. His research and teaching interests include game narrative, time, and youth creativity. He is currently a lead investigator on research projects funded by UKRI and Horizon Europe, and has collaborated on projects with government and third-sector bodies such as the United Nations and the UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
Shahrin Khan: Producer at Visai Games. Previously, she has worked on mobile games as a programmer or lead programmer, as well as Among Us, before making the transition into production. She continues to do some programming for the new game at Visai.
Emma Kidwell: An award-nominated writer currently at Firaxis, she has worked on Sid Meier’s Civilization VII, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Borderlands 4, and Life is Strange 2. She also wrote Hindsight, a game that embodies the intimate and personal stories that she wishes to add to the tapestry of video game storytelling.
Dr. Cat Manning: An IGF and Nebula-nominated game narrative designer. She is currently the narrative director on Sid Meier's Civilization VII, and formerly worked at Riot on League of Legends and R&D projects. Her prior work includes Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Scents & Semiosis, Pathologic 2, What Isn't Saved (will be lost), and the cult favorite Blaseball.
Johnnemann Nordhagen: A multi-decade veteran of the game industry who has worked in QA, research and development, programming, narrative design, and creative direction. He has published games such as the Bioshock series, Gone Home, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, and Museum of Mechanics: Lockpicking, among others. He currently works as a senior technical narrative designer at Remedy Entertainment.
Emily Short: A narrative systems consultant focused on player agency over story and games that explore human connection. She has written or contributed to dozens of games, including Fallen London, Mask of the Rose, Blood and Laurels, Counterfeit Monkey, and Galatea.
Austin Walker: A writer, designer, podcaster, and critic who lives in Queens, New York. Along with his award-winning work on podcasts like Friends at the Table, Waypoint Radio, and A More Civilized Age, he has worked for companies like Possibility Space, Wizards of the Coast, CD Projekt Red, and Dim Bulb Games.
Head here to check out all the finalists in the 2025 Independent Games Festival. The winners will be announced at the IGF Awards on Wednesday, March 19 (with a simultaneous broadcast on GDC Twitch) at the Game Developers Conference, which takes place at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. For those eager to see the awards for themselves, make sure to buy a pass for GDC 2025!
GDC returns this March 17-21, 2025, and our Early Rate is currently live (for a limited time)! For more information, be sure to visit our website and follow the #GDC2025 hashtag on social media.
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