A list of the entries in the 2008 Independent Games Festival can be found here.
It shows just how out of the loop I am that I recognize very few of these titles. And I had no idea that Slitherine was working on another History Channel title.
Finalists will be announced on December 3.
I wouldn’t worry about feeling that you’re out of the loop. One, typically there are a lot of games entered that up until they are entered no one has ever heard of, or seen before(and then it’s not unusual to never see them again after the competition). I know a few folks who have gone that route this year, with the IGF being the unveiling of their games.
Two, indie developers are terrible at communicating/marketing. Typically you have to stumble upon their games. Of course it doesn’t help that there’s really no place to communicate with in the first place. There are only a handful of sites dedicated to indie gaming, and those you sort of have to be in the know about to find them in the first place. To be fair you do sometimes see some love from the mainstream. Gamespot did a thing on IGF last year, and I know GFW has an indie section.
But I used to write for an indie web site – and still the indie self-promotion wasn’t very good. Usually I’ve heard of ten or fifteen of the dozens of entries.
Yikes, there are hundreds of entries, but a lot of them look like rehashes or clones of existing games. I’m guessing those will be the first to go when the judging starts.
The other trend I’ve started seeing in the indie space is large development teams and professional budgets, where they’re only really indie because they don’t have publisher support. I personally think they need their own category, but that’s a different matter.
I haven’t looked into the entry guidelines for this year but it used to be that there was a fairly small amount of money one could spend on their entry, I wonder if that has been changed?
I was rather surprised at the number of MMOG (and MOG in general) entries.
Troy: I remember DIY Games. :) The EIC was an IGF judge at one point. What ever happened with that site, it just seemed to cease updating one day?
About DIYGames, the EIC had a couple of bad weeks (his car caught fire), and then the site sort of imploded. There are rumblings about trying to reincarnate using a different format, maybe using a blog format to reduce backend overhead.