Just a handful of days after we received word of the IGF 2012 Main Competition finalists, we now know who will be representing the cream of the crop in the Student Showcase. Eight titles this time around have picked up $500 each for their selection, with both some new and familiar names vying for the $3,000 grand prize.

After what seems like forever, we finally get a look at the finalists for the 14th annual Independent Games Festival. The juries have announced their picks for all the categories and they include some games that have already received several awards so far as well as some newcomers.

The Pirate Kart was one of the more interesting ideas/games we saw crop up in the IGF’s official entries last year. The idea was simple: create a bunch of games in a 48 hour timeline and then release them to the world in one big package. It caught our attention almost immediately and many of the developers chimed in on our comments to talk about their individual games.

God news for those of you who are fans of both the IGF and Microsoft’s XBLA downloadable channel as the pair seem to have partnered up on the upcoming IGF awards for the next few years. Apparently, a winner will be picked from the 2012 IGF entrants from either the Main Competition or Student Showcase and announced on stage at GDC 2012.

A couple months ago we wrote about Beatbuddy’s submission to the IGF. Back then we didn’t know too much about the game other than indie developers Threaks had dubbed it the first music action adventure game. Well, that was enough to draw us in… Now they’ve released their first trailer and it’s pretty much everything I hoped for.

DigiPen strikes again! A Flipping Good Time, by the wonderful students at DigiPen, is already a game that’s been fairly discussed within the indie game space due to its being featured on the PAX10 this year, but it’s such a good game that I thought we could relive it once more.

Just a friendly reminder to all you student developers/teams that you have until tonight, at 11:59 Pacific Time, to submit your game for consideration in the IGF 2012 Student Competition. Notable past showcase winners of the contest include Octodad, Continuity, and Devil’s Tuning Fork among others. Earlier this month, the main competition revealed 568 entires, a number that totally shatters the previous record. I suspect/hope we’ll see something similar on the student side as well.

I wasn’t able to get to any IGF games yesterday, unfortunately, so I’m starting today off with one I just happened to come across by pure luck. With any luck I’ll be able to check out a couple more before the day is finished…

Anwyay, this mornings game is gShift, by deadweight studios (no caps), a 2.5D puzzle platformer that has you controlling which way the forces of gravity are pulling in order to traverse obstacles. So, for example, if you need the ceiling to be the floor, you can make it so the gravity pulls you so that the floor-ceiling are reversed, if that makes any sense.

So the IGF submissions were officially unveiled earlier this week! As somebody who covers indie games religiously this is kind of like my Christmas only instead of getting to unwrap a bunch of presents and play with them I get to scroll through hundreds of games and write about them! Seriously, I love it. As such this week’s Discussionware is dedicated to the venerable “Oscars” of indie game development.

Now today’s Discuussionware is largely about the IGF’s judging process with is a bit of a controversy every year for indie developers who’ve been submitted due to the method of partial judgement.

Braid is still considered by many to be one of the best XBLA games to ever get released. It’s combination of challenging time puzzles mixed with an intriguing plat structure and wonderful art easily made it an instant classic. Causality Flux is similar to Braid with regards to the time puzzles.

Causality Flux is a time puzzle platformer. What I mean by that is, essentially, the game is similar to Braid. You control a character who has to solve various time-related puzzles to reach complete. The semantics are different, however, in Causality Flux it doesn’t really appear that you’re simply trying to get to the other level, rather you’re trying to complete a task. One of the examples in the trailer is retrieving a girls kitten from the other side of a spike pit.