The Independent Games Festival China has revealed the Main Competition and Student finalists for its 2014 award ceremony, which celebrates the most creative indie games from throughout the Pan-Pacific area.

The GDC China co-located event is now in its fifth year, and this time around the finalists include indie games such as the rhythmic puzzler Duet, Q-Games' multiplayer open-world platformer Nom Nom Galaxy and more.

Drawing from a prize pool totaling 50,000 RMB (roughly $8,000), IGF China's Main Competition will give away six distinguished awards, covering Excellence in Audio, Design, Technology, and Visual Arts, as well as the Best Mobile Game and Best Game awards. In addition to the prestige and prizes, winners will also receive two All-Access Passes for the upcoming GDC 2015 in San Francisco.

Alongside IGF China's Main Competition, the ceremony will also host the Student Competition, which honors six of the top regional student games, with teams this year hailing from across Mainland China and Singapore.

This part of the competition includes two awards -- for Best Student Game and Excellent Student Winners -- and offers roughly 13,000 RMB (roughly $2,000) in cash prizes.

Winners in both competitions will be chosen by a panel of expert jurors including Kevin Li (CEO, TipCat Interactive); Monte Singman (Main Coordinator, IGDA Shanghai Chapter); Xubo Yang (Professor, Director of Digital Art Lab; Shanghai Jiaotong University's School of Software), Haipeng Yu (Producer, Tencent Shanghai); Chen Wang (Co-founder, Chuapp); Cloud Wu (Co-founder, Ejoy Tech) and jury chairman Simon Carless, IGF Chairman Emeritus and EVP of the GDC shows and Gamasutra.

This year's awards ceremony will take place the evening of October 20, and will run alongside the rest of GDC China, which will be held October 19-21 at the Shanghai International Convention Center in Shanghai, China.

Here are the finalists for this year's IGF China.

Main Competition

Battle Group 2, by Bane Games, Australia [Website, Video]

Duet, by Kumobius, Australia [Website, Video]

Ghost Blade, by Yushi Games, China [Website, Video]

King's League: Odyssey, by Kurechii, Malaysia [Website, Video]

Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae, by Zenith Blue, Japan [Website, Video]

Nom Nom Galaxy, by Q-Games, Japan [Website, Video]

Sumoman, by Tequilabyte Studio, Russia [Website, Video]

Zombie Commando, by Pixel Nuts Games, China [Website, Video]

Student

Team Boss, by NYU Game Center, China [Website, Video]

Iris, by DigiPen Institute of Technology Singapore, Singapore [Website, Video]

Shadow of Life, by C4Cat, Hongkong, China [Website, Video]

Lurking, by DigiPen Institute of Technology Singapore, Singapore [Website, Video]

Xi, by Communication University of China, Nanjing, China [Website, Video]

Meowchine Mayhem, by DigiPen Institute of Technology Singapore, Singapore [Website, Video]

In addition to the awards ceremony, GDC China will also host its own dedicated Independent Games Summit, which offers a host of lectures covering some of the most pertinent issues in independent development. Featured speakers include folks like OUYA developer advocate Kellee Santiago, Monument Valley lead designer Ken Wong, Lab Zero Games lead animator Mariel Cartwright, and more.

Those interested in attending either the IGF awards ceremony or the Independent Games Summit can do so by registering for a pass on the official GDC China website -- see site for more details on deadlines and restrictions.

For more information on GDC China, please visit the event's official website, or subscribe to regular updates via Twitter, Facebook, or RSS.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech

Posted by Kris Graft at 5:01 PM | Permalink

You may have recently seen some odd claims of collusion between independent developers/funders & both the Independent Games Festival and Indiecade, most recently with untrue allegations that select independent developers have worked to 'fix' both award events.

The IGF (and its parent company, which has looked into these claims) would like to assure all entrants and gamers that we take the idea of conflict of interest seriously in selecting our judging and jurying pools. Worries about the Independent Games Festival are nothing new (thanks to its perceived 'star-making' qualities), but for those who are unaware, we'll explain again how the process works.

The explanation below is the process we've had in place since 2011, and, in the interest of transparency, it will be officially added to our FAQ in the coming days:

Each year, we invite hundreds of game developers both big and small, educators, critics and press to be the initial IGF 'large' judging pool. (Think of the judges as an Oscars-style cross-section of the game community.) If any individual was directly involved in the creation of any game entered in the festival that year, they recuse themselves from judging the festival. As explained in this 2014 blog post, any interested party that works in the games industry can request an invitation to be a judge. If you are selected, you'll receive an email from us when our judging process has begun.

All submitted games are assigned to a random set of judges (nearly 375) from our 'large' judging pool. It's possible to see how the random assigning works, and third parties have verified that it's truly random - based on the game platforms the judge owns. Judges are given around 4-6 weeks to play and recommend any game they believe should be a finalist in any category.

Over time, games are randomly assigned to even more judges, to ensure a breadth of opinion. Judges can then communicate with one another to recommend games, schedule multiplayer sessions, and raise any technical issues directly with a game's developer, as well as debate the positives and negatives of specific titles. There is plenty of positive (and negative) debate on specific titles. After judges finish recommending their assigned games, they are free to explore the rest of the entered games, and vote for any additional game they believe deserves a recommendation.

At the end of the 'large' judging period, we then enter a jurying phase. There's is a different jury for each award, made up of subject matter experts - except the Audience Award, which has public votes. Here, for example, are all members that made up 2012's juries. They are given access to the total number of recommendations each game received for their particular category. They also receive another metric that they look at: a percentage that represents how many recommendations each game got from assigned judges. This helps to bring less well-known titles to light and guards against judges 'swarming' games they might have heard of.

Each jury, made up of 7-15 members, takes another 4-6 weeks to play and discuss the games in private. At the end of this discussion, each individual juror puts forward their list of nominations for the specific award they are judging - as many or as few as they like (often called 'approval voting').

These nominations may include the games that received many recommendations from the judges, but often includes titles with less recommendations as well. (Think of the juries as film festival panels, such as the Cannes Palme D'Or). The jury nominations are then tallied, and the games which received the most nominations are then decided as the finalists and honorable mentions.

At that point, each individual IGF jury then takes an additional few weeks to discuss those finalists, and casts another vote on which games they believe should be the winner in each category. Those votes are tallied by hand, and the game that received the most votes is declared the winner at the IGF Awards every March.

Our biggest issue tends to be the growing number of entries, something we hope our new and more open judge recruitment will help alleviate. Thanks, as always, to the larger community - the hundreds or even thousands - involved for helping us make the awards happen.

Posted by Full Administrator at 12:58 AM | Permalink