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Independent Games Festival 2005 Finalists

Posted by Zonk on from the gentlemen-choose-your-games dept.

frood writes "In a follow-up to slashdot's previous mention of the 2005 Independent Games Festival they have gone ahead and announced the finalists. There are 20 different games all produced without any outside publisher funding. Budgets range from 1.3 million dollars down to $0.00, with the majority coming in under 10k. There are at least 3 that can be run on Linux (Gish, Lux and N)."

7 comments

  1. War! Age of Imperiaslim - another Linux supporter by donohoedigital · · Score: 2, Informative

    War! Age of Imperialism, a finalist also runs on Linux (as well as Mac OS X and Windows). It's written in Java.

  2. Open Source by randalx · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Are any of these games open source? I figure the Indie game creators would be more keen on sharing given their limited resources.

    1. Re:Open Source by MiceHead · · Score: 1

      It's been my experience that Indie developers are, as you say, eager to share resources that benefit the game development community. This might include marketing strategies, source code, or tools. However, as businesses, small studios have to have something to sell; traditional business models suggest that it makes sense to retain control of certain assets.

      One scenario where a business might open source an entire product is an MMOG where the client and server are under an open license, and revenue is generated by unique, pay-for-play quests. I'm sure that the optimal level of open-sourceness varies from project to project.

      (As a sidenote, /. did a thread about all 81 IGF submissions earlier in the week.)
      ________________________________________________
      Inago Rage - An Independent Game About Building and Shooting Things

      --
      We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
  3. N - by Aggrazel · · Score: 1

    Cool, I mentioned N in a comment in my previous article... I'm on level 4 after much frustration... good game.

    1. Re:N - by Errabes · · Score: 2, Informative

      Too bad there is a sound pb on Linux, that freeze the whole thing for a short time quite often. It's unplayable like that.
      There is some workaround in their forum, but it still need to be fixed. http://metanet.2.forumer.com/index.php?showtopic=4 86&st=0

  4. GISH is kinda cool by Kesha · · Score: 2, Informative

    You play a little black ameba-like creature, crawling through tunnels, squeezing through narrow places, climbing the walls, jumping, swimming, etc... You can make the skin sticky and pick up bricks and toss them at baddies. The ameba feels very squishy, good physics simulation.

    My only suggestion to the developers would be to re-link against the OpenAL static libraries, because not everybody has the dynamic libraries installed - I had to go dig out my SuSE 9.1 cds to install them just to try the demo.

    Paul.

  5. Nice jury, or something by bobstevens_took_my_n · · Score: 1
    Wow, looking at the jury I see many people with a lot of years in the game industry, and some people whose qualifications are dubious. I wonder about the criteria for inclusion in the jury. IGF says this:

    The members of the IGF jury have been selected because they either are game developers themselves or they review/write about games in their daily work. In short, they are professionals in the game industry.

    And there is at least one person on the jury that I would say is emphatically not a professional in the game industry, as well as one or two people that are professionals, but don't seem to have much experience.

    I have to suggest that they refine their qualifications a little bit.