Well looky here! Not only has the IGF showered us with almost 600 indie games this year, but they’re getting into the habit of revealing/announcing games as well like Capy’s brand new game Super T.I.M.E. Force.

Those of you who are unfamiliar with Capy, you’ll likely remember them as the guys who created the fantastic and extremely well designed iOS game Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, a game that not only sold very well to fans, but also received very high critical praise for its unique pixel art style and rpg/point and click like gameplay elements.

Well it’s finally come! The day when the IGF shows its hand and reveals all the wonderful indie games that are attempting to get some recognition for their games. Unfortunately, not every indie game can win. That said, however, we here at DIY HQ are going to strive to bring you the most coverage for IGF submissions between now and sometime next year.

So, with that said, I’ve already found my first official pick… a small action-adventure platformer called Beatbuddy, by small German-based indie game company Threaks.

Just because our world is having economic troubles doesn’t mean there aren’t others suffering at the hands of globalized influx of material wealth and blah blah blah… My point is that sometimes even knights in the medieval ages have to contract themselves out to makes money. Such is the basis for IGF-submitted game Catapult for Hire.

Catapult for Hire is probably one of the more unique takes on the traditional medieval/fantasy setting that I’ve ever seen. As I already mentioned, you play as a knight who, well, has a catapult for hire. He’s a freelancer! Only instead of freelancing out his writing, programming, marketing, etc. skills he’s freelancing out his catapulting skills… and his catapult!

IGF submitted games are coming out of the woodwork now that the submission process is officially over. While we don’t have a complete list of games submit ed quite yet — the IGF has released them — we have been able to find quite a few. Today’s game is called Trail and it was created by two developers who formerly worked at Lionhead Studios and created their own studio called Bit By Bit Games.

Trail is an interesting game. First, the developers are dubbing it a “short” game. In fact, in their email to me they even state that they’re following the original Pixar model of creating shorts which allow we gamers to experience new technology/ideas that simply don’t work when expanded. Those of you who are big Pixar fans will remember that Pixar started out in very much a similar way prior to creating their first full length feature film Toy Story.

Rock Paper Shotgun has an interesting scoop this morning as it appears that the new game the Introversion submitted to IGF is a game called Pirson Architect.

Those of you who read the blog regularly will remember that it was only a couple days ago that our own Lewie Procter revealed that Introversion had submitted an entirely new game that wasn’t Subversion (which has been suspended).

Not much is yet known about the game, but that’s the first image up above.

Apparently, as one would expect, Prison Architect is a game in which you manage and build a maximum security prison. What this entails exactly we don’t quite know, I’m thinking it could be a tycoon/sim game of some sort, but really that’s left open for interpretation.

We’ve gone ahead and contacted Introversion for more information and assets so once we get em, we’ll update you guys.

[Introversion]

Konjak is one amazing developer. He’s already created some of my very favorite indie games available and he gives them all away for free. Noitu Love, Nopitu Love 2, Legend of Princess… seriously, I would pay money for each of these games as they’re definitely worth it.

Which is why I’m sooo happy he’s decided to submit his newest — still in development — Metroidvania title The Iconoclasts to the IGF as I think he definitely deserves some serious recognition for his work and the quality of games he releases for free.

Anyway, Konjak has created a brand new trailer showing off the game for the IGF people. It’s in widescreen, which is really cool since Konjak’s games are usually not. The graphics also look much sharper than what we’re used to. Apparently the newest build is in HD!

Check it out below and look for it when the IGF submissions are released latter this year.

In the mean time, if you don’t want to wait, you can download and play an earlier version of The Iconoclasts right now via the link below. According to Konjak the version available now is “quite inferior” to what he has now, but it should certainly satiate your gaming desires.

[Konjak]

Trailer

Welcome to the student finalist edition of our IGF China discussion. Yesterday we looked at several great games in the main competition. There were quite a few 2D games in that batch, and I wonder if we’ll see the same today with the students’ projects. Stay to the end, as the final game will probably please Portal-like fans.

IGF China judges have narrowed down the student entries to six, so it won’t be as long as yesterday’s report (if you’re length adverse). Five of the six entrants are from Singapore, and three of those are from the DigiPen Institute of Technology. I’m roughly guessing that is where you want to go to school if you are in the region.

In Nanobytes by Singapore Polytechnic School of Design (Splat Studios), players seem to be tasked with clearing all the characters from the screen in a certain number of clicks. Different colored nanobytes may have other properties. From Nanobyte’s Facebook page, it seems you can cause the characters to panic and commit suicide. Patience is also key; one should allow the characters to multiply to destroy them all in a chain.

In Pixi by DigiPen Institute of Technology players heard this bright dashes of light called pixies to defeat the oncoming boxies and protect the star-ies (?) on the ground. It’s like Missile Command gameplay if you could guide the missiles like wind with Geometry Wars-esque visuals. I dig it.

In Robotany, players influence the behaviors of robot-like creatures in a garden-building sandbox game (genius game name!). Apparently, with just a limited amount of conditional commands the AI will determine what to do in unspecified situations.

Robotany by Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab not only has a video, it also has a playable prototype for your enjoyment.

Shadow Fight by China Central Academy of Fine Art is definitely a wild card for me. I enjoyed seeing the nurse literally fall to pieces as the hands of the heady zombie. I’m not sure how I feel about the Bumblebee Transformer. Animation and mechanics overall seem crude; for instance, characters don’t seem to die when their health appears empty. Still, I can’t recall many fighting games in IGF-style competitions, and I hope this inspires other developers to throw their fists into the fray.

Terra: the Legend of the Geochine by DigiPen Institute of Technology is physics puzzle platformer that allows players to control both their character and the world at the same time. Aesthetically, it reminded me of a 32-bit PSX/Saturn game called Pandemonium, but with must better graphics and more thoughtful gameplay. Ok, so as I watched, it became less Pandemonium, and more “How the heck can I handle the screen moving so much?!” but in a good way.

The final student finalist is Void by DigiPen Institute of Technology caught the attention of Indie Games back in August and seems to have done well to impress the judges thus far. It’s a first person adventure puzzler of sorts. Through various mechanics players go between (at least) two realities to traverse the game world and solve puzzles. Pretty damn spiffy!

Make sure to check out the IGF China 2011 main competition finalists, too. Winners will be announced in November.

[Gamasutra]

IGF organizers have announced they’re accepting submissions for the 14th annual competition which last year saw Minecraft take the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. This year a record amount of cash prizes will be up for grabs at just under $60,000. With the aforementioned McNally winner taking home a whopping $30,000–a 50% increase from last year.

Other notables include the abstract-applauding Nuovo Award which will net a dev $5,000, and $3,000 each for the rest of the categories: Excellence in Visual Art, Audio, and Design, Technical Excellence, Best Mobile Game, the Best Student Game, and Audience Award.

All games selected as finalists will be playable at the IGF Pavilion on the GDC show floor from March 7-9, 2012. If you’re an indie developer interested in submitting an entry, you can get more info here. Main competition submissions have until October 17, while students get an extra couple of weeks and have through October 31.

The key dates from today through the festival itself:

- June 30, 2011 – Submissions Open

- October 17, 2011 – Submission Deadline, Main Competition

- October 31, 2011 – Submission Deadline, Student Competition

- January 5, 2012 – Finalists Announced, Main Competition

- January 12, 2012 – Finalists Announced, Student Competition

- March 5 – March 9, 2012 – Game Developers Conference 2012

- March 5 – March 6, 2012 – Indie Games Summit @ GDC 2012

- March 7 – March 9, 2012 – IGF Pavilion @ GDC 2012

- March 7, 2012 – IGF Awards Ceremony (Winners Announced!)

Of course we can’t wait for the finalist list to hit so we can try out all of those great games that perhaps are still in their infant stages at this very moment. Oh the unknown potential!

[Gamasutra]

I like the concept of Piclings from Fabrication Games. Taking real life photos to create endless amounts of platforming levels is a stress-free way for people like me who don’t want to build levels from scratch. That’s Piclings innovative mechanic. From the video, there appears to be two enemies to avoid and coins and presumably a rainbow butterfly token to collect. The character design is cute enough. However, 3 characters seems like the tip of an iceberg for any platforming game. To me, Piclings is a great idea of a game and maybe the developers need to see some support to fully flesh out the concept.

Fabrication Games, who made Piclings, is no newcomer to game development. They won an International Mobile Game Award for Innovation for Kodo Evolved and picked up other awards along their 10 years of developing at IGF, Into the Pixel, and Nokia Innovation Challenge. Yes, some developers were part of Jadestone before, but that’s just semantics.

For those who have seen or want to discover platforming levels in everyday life, Piclings is available now for $0.99 to snap photos, jump around, and share.

Piclings official website

DIY featured the first part of our interview with Anosou’s musical genius Mattias Gerdt here. This week, IGF will reveal if Cobalt wins the award for excellence in audio design. Award or not, Mattias is definitely building up a winning collection of tracks for Cobalt. And by winning, I mean the gamers win. And that’s really all that matters, right?

The conclusion features discussions about legal issues of using music, what makes a game’s sound IGF worthy, chiptunes, inspirations, and how everyone can do more to get gaming music more recognition.

DIY:  From a a legal standpoint, when is a sound yours? When are you allowed to borrow sounds?
Mattias: I personally have bought quite a few sample libraries, i.e. collections of musical data that can be “played” as instruments. I particularly love the stuff from BitWord and LapJockey, both focusing on more synthetic sounds.

In all these cases you can use them commercially as soon as you buy them because you gain a “license” to use the sounds. But in the case of synthesizers, you build them from the ground up.

I think most composers have a ridiculous collection of samples and synths really: free or bought.

DIY: It’s neat you use visualizations to imagine and create a song. Do you start to imagine how that place “sounds” or how the game BGM should sound?
Mattias: I think I’m a bit too jaded. I primarily start thinking about how that place would sound if it was a video game and what it’s role would be. I think a lot in terms of it being actually a game to begin with.

I listen to tons of game music myself. Then after that I start thinking about it as an environment that’s just that, an environment, but that’s more to get an extra dimension. In a lot of scenarios it makes no sense thinking of how a place “sounds”. For example, if it’s an abstract environment with geometric shapes.

I’m quite the game music fan (I have a collection of 270+ game music CDs for example) and I’ve studied how game music has been used before in both old and modern games. It’s perhaps particularly good when you want to avoid repeating what’s been done. If you know everything that’s been done, it’s easier to stay away from it if the situation calls for that.

DIY: Tell me more about the Radio Chip track.

Mattias: There’s a funny story about that track. It was made for Cobalt’s in-game “radio system”. We have these little radios sprinkled around the world and the player can change the channel and listen to some music that would definitely not fit as background music.

The chip track started out as a joke because at the time I were seeing all these indie games with chiptune soundtracks. It was kind of a “look, I can do it too!” thing. Then it evolved into something that doesn’t really share the “chiptune aesthetic” if there is such a thing. It’s not super melodic, and I mix in non-chip sounds, a TR-909 drum machine.

DIY: What does it mean to strictly adhere to creating chiptune or any other similar “concept”?

Mattias: Well there’s a whole world of that. I even wrote my bachelor’s thesis in musicology on Game Boy music and realized both how different yet strict it were.

It kind of varies, though. American chiptune tends to mix in more “non-chip” sounds in my experience, while the Swedish music for example, especially Game Boy-based, are almost only Game Boy and nothing else.

I used a Game Boy (DMG-01) and LittleSoundDJ primarily for the Radio Chip track but processed it externally in Propellerhead Record and added the drums just to make it a bit beefier really. While I do admire people who strictly follow the limitations of the original hardware, it’s not something I think is better or worse really.

DIY: Outside of the Bladerunner reference, do you have any influences or inspirations that led to any of cobalt’s soundtrack?
Mattias: Influences always fluctuate; sometimes I’m really into this one band but the other day I’m completely obsessed with an old soundtrack.

For Cobalt, I think Steve Reich and Kimitaka Matsumae were important. While I got inspired by Reich, I can’t say I’m writing in any similar style like he is, but I love the thought of minimalism in general. I think it was there in the back of my head.

Regarding Kimitaka Matsumae, I had been listening a lot to his soundtrack for KILEAK, THE BLOOD. He personally sent me the soundtrack release, a re-recorded version, and it’s utter genius. It has this dark atmosphere with pulsating sounds, lush pads and repeating patterns that create an amazing mood. I can listen to that CD for hours!

Otherwise I get influenced by everything I see/read/hear/talk about in one way or the other. It’s hard to pinpoint something. Most of all I got inspired by the Oxeye theme and their game.

DIY: What about the team inspired you?
Mattias: Well, the three guys that are Oxeye are utterly amazing people. I was quite humbled by how nice and intelligent they were when I first joined their IRC channel to talk before I got the gig.

It’s a delightful mix of deep philosophical thought and a bunch of guys drinking beer and cracking jokes. They’re all really good at what they do too.

DIY: Have you listened to the other IGF audio finalists? What do you think earns a finalist nomination for IGF?
Mattias: That’s a really tricky question. I don’t think it’s innovation. Retro City Rampage is straight up NES, for example. Interactivity is perhaps a key point but then again RCR is a black sheep and Cobalt isn’t impressively interactive. It can’t just be music because Amnesia is a lot about SFX.

I think the key is how well the audio works with the game. If that’s interactive music like in Bit.Trip Beat or an innovative narrator like in Bastion, that’s up to the judges.

I think Cobalt was nominated because everything really worked together. The atmosphere is incredibly dense for a 2D platform/shooter/adventure. It’s innovative in that manner but I don’t know if that’s what people mean with “innovation”.

DIY: Are there more good games than there are good game soundtracks?
Mattias: That’s a filthy lie! Start with these. There are plenty of really bad games with great soundtracks, just look at Cheetahmen II!

I guess there might be some truth in your statement though but then again “good” is so personal, what’s a good game and what’s good music? Something I love as a game you might hate and vice versa.

DIY: Then let’s call it “critically acclaimed”.
Mattias: That’s just because critics don’t care about the music.

DIY: Good games seem to make more news headlines than good game music, sadly.
Mattias: It’s hardly ever mentioned in reviews, like ever.

DIY: So, how do we get OSTs to headline more articles?
Mattias: Good question, no easy answer either. I’m not sure you can force that because game music is made to enhance the game after all. Do SFX or controls get headlines? Art books?

I think it’s up to the gamers. If they do like the music and want to hear more about game music-related news and such, they need to make their voices heard. Sites like OCR really help promote and raise awareness of game music through arrangements. That’s very easy to write about for journalists. Making notes about soundtrack releases is probably news worthy, but that’s such a specialized interest.

I think the key is to get reviewers and media in general to just mention the music in games, how well it works etc. The more attention music gets as an integral part, the more people will realize that it IS an integral part. To be completely honest though, people are free to play games without music. I sure as hell listen to game music without having played the games.

It’s like movies. The best scores just complements the movie in some way (gives it more depth, enhances feelings, and mood). If they take too much attention, the viewer loses focus on the movie. That’s dangerous. The same goes for games many times, even though my opinion might be controversial.