Indie game lovers will be pleased to learn that the IndieCade 2010 finalists have been announced. The IndieCade conference, heading into its fourth year, aims to promote the innovative culture of independent games development around the globe.
From 350 submission, a panel of 160 judges composed of industry experts ranging from developers to prominent journalists, have chosen 32 finalists. The finalists are all eligible for award withing the following categories: Aesthetics; Gameplay Innovation; Fun / Compelling; Technological Innovation; World / Story; Vanguard; Sublime Experience; Virtuoso; Documentary Games; Sound; Wild Card; Jury; and The IndieCade 2010 Honorary Trailblazer Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Indie game awards ceremonies give much needed exposure to independent developers, and often result in publishers snapping up talent like hungry hippos. Below is the list of 32 finalists – take note, you could be seeing these games reappearing on digital download platforms very soon.
Links are included so you can visit the developers websites. For a more comprehensive breakdown of the finalists, be sure to visit the IndieCade 2010 website.
1066 – The Game – (Preloaded / Channel 4, United Kingdom): A historical game commissioned by Channel 4 (UK) to accompany it’s two part documentary series on the War of 1066 and the battle for Middle Earth.
A Slow Year – (Ian Bogost, USA): A Slow Year is a collection of four game “poems” for the Atari Video Computer System, one for each season, about the experience of observation and awareness.
Auditorium – (Cipher Prime, USA): Auditorium is an audio puzzle game where you convert light into sound, creating an explosion of orchestral music.
B.U.T.T.O.N. (Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now) – (Copenhagen Game Collective, Denmark): B.U.T.T.O.N. is a four-player, one-button party game played with Xbox controllers on the PC.
BIT.TRIP RUNNER – (Gaijin Games, USA): BIT.TRIP RUNNER features music from Anamanaguchi driving a energetic and exciting rhythm action platforming game.
Blue Lacuna – (Aaron Reed, USA): Blue Lacuna is among the largest text-based interactive stories ever produced, a full-length novel and adventure game in one.
Cargo Delivery – (Cats in the Sky, Sao Paulo, Brazil): Cargo Delivery is a skill-based puzzle game revolving around the adventures of Rufus, whom must sail a freighter with loads of cargo across churning seas and around numerous obstacles.
Castle Vox – (Sillysoft, Canada): Castle Vox is a fully realized digital board game which brings the engaging multiplayer social play and strategy of Diplomacy and Axis and Allies to the digital realm of turn based strategy.
Continuity – (Ragtime Games, Sweden): A well-designed and mechanically clever mashup of a simple platformer with classic sliding puzzle gameplay.
Creaky Old Memory – (DADIU, Denmark): Creaky Old Memory puts players in the role of Tatiana, an elderly Russian lady who must journey through the nooks and crannies of her self-fabricated house in order to reveal the truth about her own past.
Every Day The Same Dream – (Molleindustria, Italy): EDTSD is an attempt to translate a well known narrative about daily routine and white collar alienation into a playable form. Only by finding subtle deviations from the repetitive, looping levels can the player free the character from a meaningless eternal present.
Faraway – (Steph Thirion, USA): Faraway is a one-button game where you swing your way through space, finding and connecting star clusters to create the most complex constellations you can.
FATALE – (Tale of Tales, Belgium): FATALE is an interactive vignette in real-time 3D inspired by the biblical story of Salomé and the play about her by Oscar Wilde.
feelforit – (Chris DeLeon, USA): feelforit is a small art toy for iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone, that exploits the affordances of the device’s accelerometer to create an abstract, spatialized metaphor for how we navigate our lives.
Fractal – (Cipher Prime, USA): Fractal is an audio puzzle game; listen as the game reacts to your decisions, taking easy-to-learn, hard-to-master gameplay to new extremes.
Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche Islands – Gentlemen of the South Sandwiche islands is a lovingly-crafted board game in which gentlemen callers compete for the attentions of Lady Ashley by strategically crossing bridges to get her alone on of a series of small islands.
Groping in the Dark – (Team Arex, South Korea): Groping in the Dark is a lyrical interactive narrative that tells the story of a kidnapped girl’s decision and attempt to escape her captors.
Humans vs. Zombies – (Gnarwhal Studios, USA): Humans vs. Zombies is a moderated game of tag where all but one player begin as humans. The horde is generated by the randomly-selected “Original Zombie,” who can tag human players and turn them into zombies.
LIMBO – (Playdead, Denmark): Limbo is a hauntingly beautiful black and white “horror” platform puzzler, set among the rooftops of a mesmerizing macabre world that draws you into its dark narrative.
Miegakure – (Marc ten Bosch, USA): Miegakure is a platform game where you solve puzzles by exploring the fourth dimension
Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess! – (Mediatonic, United Kingdom): Monsters (Probably) Stole my Princess! is a vertical platformer in which you take control of the super sexy aristocratic demon known only as “The Duke” in a fantastical world where chasing down giant yet adorable monsters is the business at hand.
Recurse – (Matt Parker, USA): Recurse has a simple, embodied mechanic: A video camera transforms the player’s body into a giant cursor. A digital game about movement in physical space, the Recurse’s distorted “funhouse mirror” encourages players to forget themselves as they twist and stretch their bodies in order to get a high score and effect the game’s abstract world.
Retro/Grade – (24 Caret Games, USA): Retro/Grade is an innovative PS3 game that fuses the white-knuckle thrills and over the top visuals of a shooter with the broad appeal of a rhythm game.
Sixteen Tons – (Nathalie Pozzi and Eric Zimmerman, USA): Sixteen Tons is a gallery installation in which four players move heavy sections of steel pipe on a colourful grid. This simple gameplay is complicated by the social interaction of a mechanic in which players bid to hire other players (using real cash) to move their pieces, enacting the game’s central themes of debt bondage and forced labour.
Socks, Inc. – (Jim Babb/Data Played, USA): Socks, Inc. is a family-oriented alternate reality that combines web 2.0 co-creation and adventure within an imaginary world entirely populated with sock puppets.
Solace – (One Man Down, USA): Solace is an interactive aesthetic experience utilizing dynamic audio and “bullet hell” overtones to provide a unique perspective on the five stages of grief.
Spirits – (Spaces of Play, Germany): Spirits is an action-puzzle game for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad with a Lemmings-style mechanic in which players manipulate the wind to guide name-giving Spirits towards each level of the game world.
Tic-Tac-Totum – (Jesse Fuchs, USA): Tic-Tac-Totem is an “open source” tabletop game that uses the traditional game elements of dice and poker chips in clever and novel ways.
The Cat And The Coup – (Peter Brinson, USA): The Cat and the Coup is a documentary game in which you play the cat of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran.
The Games of Nonchalance – (Nonchalance, USA): An epic, immersive, poly-media, real-world adventure. Four episodes of interactive content lead participants on a journey through the fabric of San Francisco and discover the threads of a narrative woven into the city’s past and present.
TRAUMA – (Krystian Majewski, Germany): TRAUMA takes you into the subconscious of a young woman who survives a car accident as you explore her dreams and memories.
VVVVVV – (Terry Cavanagh, Ireland): In VVVVVV, you play as the fearless leader of a team of dimension-exploring scientists who are separated after inadvertently crashing their ship.
Discuss the IndieCade 2010 finalists on the MyGaming forum.
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