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 Organizers of the 2013 Independent Games Festival are pleased to announce the latest additions to its discipline-specific jury panels that will determine the finalists and winner of its various awards.
The jury announcements for this year are beginning with some of the industry professionals, independent game notables and former IGF award winners that will make up its Excellence in Visual Art and Excellence in Audio Awards.
The latest jury rundown following prior announcements of its Nuovo and debut Narrative Award jurists, as well as this year's Design and Technical Excellence juries.
The Excellence in Visual Art Award
The Visual Art award is a category which seeks to highlight the innovation and quality in visuals for indie games.
Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Visual Art award have been entrants which featured impressive displays of the craft of games, including The Behemoth's vibrant cartoon-ish beat-em-up Castle Crashers, Polytron's 2D/3D "trixel"-based puzzle platformer Fez, Amanita Design's hand-painted adventure game Machinarium, Playdead's equal parts soft and stark monochromatic puzzler Limbo, and thechineseroom's ambient first-person exploration game Dear Esther.
The jury consists of the following:
- Grant Duncan (founding member & artist on Hello Games' IGF finalist Joe Danger)
- Jen Zee (Supergiant Games art director on games including Bastion)
- Jakub Dvorsky (founder, Amanita Design, creators of multiple IGF award winning games like Samorost, Machinarium & Botanicula)
- Ben Esposito (independent artist & designer, most recently level designer of The Unfinished Swan)
- Sara Gross (independent illustrator and artist on games like Oregon Whale)
- Beth Maher (illustrator, designer and developer of games like Kreayshawn: the Game)
- Steven Burgess (former designer of Frontier's LostWinds, now working with Hello Games on the iOS version of Joe Danger)
- Kelly Smith (artist & animator at Capy on games including Critter Crunch & Clash of Heroes)
- Richard Hogg (artist on Honeyslug games including Poto & Cabenga, Frobisher Says & IGF finalist Hohokum)
- Patrick Smith (as 'Vectorpark', creator of games & interactive toys like Windosill, Feed the Head & Levers)
The Excellence In Audio Award
The Excellence in Audio Award is a category which seeks to highlight the best musical and sound innovation, quality, and impressiveness in independent gaming.
Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Excellence in Audio award have gone out to games which took an entirely new and unique to approach to sound in games or otherwise excelled at their craft, including Queasy Games' abstract acoustic guitar shooter Everyday Shooter, PixelJunk Eden from Q-Games and Osaka musician/DJ Baiyon, and Amanita Design's delightful & charming adventure Botanicula.
The jury includes the following:
- Shaw-Han Liem (co-creator and audio lead of Queasy Games' Sound Shapes, performs as I Am Robot And Proud)
- Darren Korb (audio lead at Bastion creators Supergiant Games)
- David Lloyd & Larry Oji (respectively, musician and founder of game music site OverClocked ReMix; OCR head and soundtrack director on Capcom's Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.)
- Emily Ridgway (music director and audio designer on games like BioShock, Brutal Legend & Costume Quest)
- Laura Shigihara (composer, developer, and singer-songwriter best known for her work on Plants Vs. Zombies)
- Damien Kastbauer (audio designer with credits on games including XCOM, Uncharted, Rock Band, Drawn To Life, and Sam & Max)
- Kristen Quebe (audio designer with credits on games including Condemned, Fable & Halo)
All entries in the 2013 Independent Games Festival Main Competition are currently browsable at the IGF's official site, where you can also soon find more complete biographical information on all of this year's juries, as more are announced over the next few weeks. (The IGF is part of the UBM Tech Game Network, as is this website.)
Main Competition finalists will be announced -- along with a jury statement detailing the thought process behind selecting its lineup -- on Monday, January 7th 2013, with the winner announced on the evening of March 27th at the live-streamed, multi-thousand person attended IGF Awards ceremony during GDC 2013 -- for which registration is now open.
Organizers of the 2013 Independent Games Festival are pleased to announce the latest additions to its discipline-specific jury panels that will determine the finalists and winner of its various awards.
The jury announcements for this year are beginning with some of the industry professionals, independent game notables and former IGF award winners that will make up its Excellence in Design and Technical Achievement Awards, as well as high-profile additions to its Nuovo and Narrative awards, the first members of which were recently announced.
Former Journey producer and designer and current Funomena co-founder Robin Hunicke will be joining both the Nuovo and Narrative juries. Also joining the Narrative jury is Telltale writer and designer Sean Vanaman, notable for his work co-writing the recent award-winning Walking Dead adventure series. And the Nuovo Award jury will also see the inclusion of designer,
curator and Kokoromi art collective co-founder Heather Kelley and Lea
Schoenfelder, creator of former IGF finalist Ulitsa Dimitrova.
While the juries continue to be assembled in advance of the kick-off of our next phase of the finalist selection process, we're happy to announce the following confirmed jurists.
The Excellence in Design Award
The Excellence in Design award is a category which seeks to highlight the innovation and quality of the underlying blueprint of each entered game -- component parts like its mechanic design, level design, and difficulty balancing.
Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Excellence in Design Award have included 2D Boy's cartoon construction puzzler World of Goo, Pocketwatch Games' abstracted multiplayer heist game Monaco, QCF's rogue-like puzzler Desktop Dungeons and procedurally-generated platformer Spelunky.
The confirmed jury to date consists of the following:
- George Fan (freelance designer & creator of Plants vs. Zombies)
- Ricky Haggett (co-founder of Frobisher Says & Hohokum creators Honeyslug)
- Cindy Poremba (researcher, artist and curator, member of game/art collective Kokoromi)
- Edmund McMillen (creator of games including Super Meat Boy & The Binding of Isaac)
- Chelsea Howe (SuperBetter Labs & Zynga designer, creator of indie titles including The End Of Us)
- Petri Purho (designer of the IGF award winning Crayon Physics Deluxe)
- Bennett Foddy (creator of QWOP, CLOP & IGF finalist GIRP)
- Danny Day (co-creator of IGF winner Desktop Dungeons)
- Kevin Cancienne (designer of games including Drop7)
- Kevin Zuhn (creative director of IGF student showcase finalist OctoDad)
- Joel Burgess (senior designer at Bethesda on games including Fallout 3 & Skyrim)
The Technical Excellence Award
The Technical Excellence award is a category which seeks to highlight the innovation and quality in game engines and code.
Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Technical Excellence award
have gone to entrants which featured impressive displays of the craft of
games, including Dylan Fitterer's sonic-landscape racing/puzzle
category finalist Audiosurf and that year's winner from 2D Boy, World of Goo, Data Realms' 2009 2D platforming-action winner Cortex Command, 2010 winner Limbo, and Frictional Games' 2011 winner Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
The confirmed jury to date consists of the following: - Brett Douville (LucasArts veteran and lead programmer at Skyrim creators Bethesda)
- Paul Du Bois (senior programmer at Psychonauts Brutal Legend creators Double Fine)
- Renaud Bedard (Capy and former Polytron engineer behind IGF award-winning Fez)
- Anna Kipnis (AI and game play programmer for Double Fine)
- Chris Delay (Lead designer, artist and programmer at Introversion, creator of Uplink, DEFCON & the IGF award-winning Darwinia
- Ivan Safrin (Visual artist and programmer behind games like Owl Country & Bit World)
- Tyler Glaiel (creator of IGF award winner Closure)
- Andy Nealen (games researcher at NYU Poly & core team member of Hemisphere Games, creators of the IGF award-winning Osmos)
- Alex May (co-creator of IGF finalist Eufloria)
- Andy Hull (programmer of IGF winner Spelunky)
All entries in the 2013 Independent Games Festival Main Competition are currently browsable at the IGF's official site, where you can also soon find more complete biographical information on all of this year's juries, as more are announced over the next few weeks. (The IGF is part of the UBM Tech Game Network, as is this website.)
Main Competition finalists will be announced -- along with a jury statement detailing the thought process behind selecting its lineup -- on Monday, January 7th 2013, with the winner announced on the evening of March 27th at the live-streamed, multi-thousand person attended IGF Awards ceremony during GDC 2013 -- for which registration is now open.
 The organizers of the Independent Games Festival, the leading showcase for independent video games worldwide, have announced a new agreement with Valve for IGF 2013.
All IGF Main Competition finalists for this year's event will receive the opportunity to accept a distribution agreement for Steam, a leading platform for distribution in today's burgeoning independent gaming market.
This means every single Main Competition finalist in each of the jury-voted categories - the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence In Design, Excellence In Art, Excellence In Narrative, Technical Excellence, Excellence in Audio, and even the Nuovo Award - can work directly with Steam to bring their titles to PC, Mac and Linux.
This agreement comes as the 2013 Independent Games Festival rolls out its new, cutting-edge judging website back-end - including a dedicated mobile judge app, social-style discussion tools for games, and the ability for judges and contestants to easily connect to resolve technical problems.
With over 200 distinguished judges discussing and recommending titles for named, discipline-specific juries in each of the seven main categories, IGF 2013 will announce its finalists in January 2013, and award winners at Game Developers Conference 2013 in San Francisco this March.
Finalists and winners of the Independent Games Festival since its 1999 debut have included landmark indie games such as Braid, World of Goo, Super Meat Boy, Portal predecessor Narbacular Drop, Minecraft, and a host of other seminal titles. Valve joins other supporters of the 2013 IGF including media sponsors Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine, as well as Platinum Sponsor Microsoft Studios and Platinum Student Showcase Sponsor DigiPen.
Organizers of the 2013 Independent Games Festival are pleased to announce the first discipline-specific jury panels that will determine the finalists and winner of its various awards.
The jury announcements for this year are beginning with some of the industry professionals, independent game notables and former IGF award winners that make up its Nuovo award, as well as its first ever Excellence in Narrative Award.
While the juries are still being assembled in advance of the kick-off of our next phase of the finalist selection process, we're happy to announce the following confirmed jurists.
The Excellence in Narrative Award
The following jurists are among those chosen to lead the IGF's debut Excellence in Narrative award, which is intended to recognize innovation, quality, and impressiveness of storytelling in a game, including, but not limited to, scenario, plot construction, story, and dialogue.
The Excellence in Narrative jury will include the following:
- Emily Short (creative director at Linden Lab & author of interactive fiction works including Galatea and Alabaster)
- Dan Pinchbeck (thechineseroom co-founder and co-creator of 2012 winner Dear Esther)
- Rob Dubbin (Emmy-award winning writer for the Colbert Report, as well as IF works Earl Grey & the Facebook reboot of Where In the World is Carmen Sandiego?)
- Jim Munroe (author, filmmaker, and writer of interactive works including Everybody Dies, Guilded Youth & Unmanned)
- Chris Dahlen (journalist and writer on the recent Mark of the Ninja)
- Ben Schroder (journalist and writer on Funcom's MMO The Secret World)
- Wiley Wiggins (founder of Karakasa Games, currently producing iPad adventure Thunderbeam)
The Nuovo Award
Now in its fifth year, the Nuovo Award -- which allows more esoteric
'art games' to compete on their own terms alongside longer-form indie
titles -- has previously been awarded to Jason Rohrer's abstract
multiplayer title Between, Tuning -- the perception-warping platform puzzler from Swedish indie Cactus, and Messhof's low-res tug-of-war battler Nidhogg.
The Nuovo jury will include the following:
- Stephen Lavelle (better known as 'increpare', creator of 2012 Design finalist English Country Tune.)
- Pippin Barr (video game maker, critic, and author of 'How to Play a Video Game')
- Nicolai Troshinsky (illustrator, filmmaker, and creator of UFO on Tape & 2011 Nuovo finalist Loop Raccord)
- Frank Lantz (creative director and co-founder of Area/Code)
- Rod Humble (CEO of Second Life creator Linden Lab, and experimental game creator behind The Marriage and Stars Over Half Moon Bay)
- Paolo Pedercini (game developer at Molleindustria [Phone Story, Every Day The Same Dream], artist and educator at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University)
- Jason Rohrer (independent developer and creator of Inside a Star-filled Sky, Sleep Is Death, Passage and 2009 Nuovo winner Between)
- Jeroen D Stout (co-founder of Stout Games, the studio behind IGF 2011 Nuovo nominee Dinner Date)
- Daniel Benmergui (independent developer, author, creator of Nuovo finalists Today I Die & Storyteller)
All entries in the 2013 Independent Games Festival are currently browsable at the IGF's official site,
where you can also soon find more complete biographical information on
all of this year's juries, as more are announced over the next few
weeks. (The IGF is part of the UBM Tech Game Network, as is this
website.)
Main Competition finalists will be announced -- along with a jury
statement detailing the thought process behind selecting its lineup --
on Monday, January 7th 2013, with the winner announced on the evening of
March 27th at the live-streamed, multi-thousand person attended IGF
Awards ceremony during GDC 2013 -- for which registration is now open.
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