IGF Main Competition Finalists Announced

[Traveler]

It's actually old news already and some of you might alread have seen the results, but apparently IGF has announced the Main Competition finalists for 2007, mid December last year.
Regrettably, Iron Strike (http://www.pascalgamedevelopment.com/viewtopic.php?t=3549), submitted by our own Huehnerschaender is not one of them.

The 23 finalists as well as their games can be found here (http://www.igf.com/02finalists.html).

[WILL]

And as you might have guessed why the lack of news overflowing the PGD boards from Dirk and I. :P

Though there were some really nice entries this year. Many we were proud to lose to. ;)

I think the reason for the poor rating was that we tried to do too much in too little time. If we had another few months perhaps Dirk and I could have gotten all the major bugs worked out and tested it properly. But alas... it was fun to make if nothing else.


Hopefully this will be a valuable lesson to those that step up to the IGF in the near future.

[Huehnerschaender]

I think I owe you at least the E-Mail I got from IGF. I found it several weeks after the announcement. I must have overseen it somehow in the bunch of mails.

So here it is (declared as an anonymous judgement):



Hey there IGF entrant,

Firstly, thanks again for entering the 2007 Independent Games Festival. The
standards were extremely high this year, so our commiserations if you didn't
make the finalists, but whether you did or not, our esteemed band of judges
(http://www.igf.com/judges.html) made literally hundreds of game ratings, and
tried to comment on as many games as possible, anonymously.

Thus, here's your anonymous feedback. The judges were instructed to keep it as
constructive as possible, incidentally! If there's anything in there that you
want to excerpt on your website for promotional reasons, you are welcome to -
just put '2007 Independent Games Festival Judge' as the credit for the quote:

Nice job, this is a really fun game! I like your treatment of the terrain as well as the camera. I wish I had a map (did I just not find it?) so I didn't have to drive around at random. Wish I didn't have to wait at the beginning for the narrative. Perhaps give me control right away and an arrow or something to direct me to my enemies? well done!

Thanks again for entering, hope to see you competing again in subsequent years -
and we hope you'll consider attending the IGF and Independent Games Summit in
San Francisco next March, even if you didn't make it this time.

Regards,
Simon Carless
[IGF Chairman.]


Making the entry was real fun and from time to time pure stress, too. We really messed up with "half working" things in the end, so I am not disappointed or something. I started too late on polishing Tanx for IGF. But what scared me is, that the entrants (and not only those who are nominated) partially are of a quality I was not dreaming of. Even if I did my best from the beginning and manage to fix all bugs before the submission, I don't think that the result for Iron Strike was another. Too many too good entrys :)

But now I know how to deal with IGF in the future.... make a game which shoots the judges out of their socks :)

Greetings,
Dirk

[WILL]

Oh cool. I'm glad I got to see that. At least we know they didn't absolutely 'hate' it. :lol:

Well Dirk... stuff to write down in a list for the fixed version of Stormfront. ;)

[czar]

Some of the entries are amazing though. Way beyond a hobby game.

Are we able to download and play iron strike now?

[Huehnerschaender]

Unfortunately I did not do anything on Iron Strike yet since the submission. I want and I will fix the issues someday when I finished my current project. So all I could offer is the very buggy IGF version.

[savage]

I still think that Tanx could have done better if there had been more time to polish it up. There is nothing in the rules to say you can't re-submit it next year if it is greatly improved.

Like last year, SSS will be paying the entry fee to the IGF, for the winner of this year's competition.

This year's theme will be, we think, quite challenging, but our goals are high. We really want something that can be submitted to the IGF, which will get noticed and at least make the finals. Then in 2008/9 we'll aim for a submission that may win :).

[Huehnerschaender]

I think my current project is able to be noticed at IGF this year :)

But I already started it, so this one will not enter the PGD Annual. But my goal is to get it a working, bugfree, funny game in the end. And the basics are already working great in my opinion. I was working hard on it the last 3 weeks and the current result amazes me myself sometimes *hehe*

So the point is, if I find this game good enough in the end, I will submit it on my own to IGF. There is much time left to finish it, and this time, I did the game engine using the experiences from my projects and "playgrounds" of the past. In fact, Tanx was my really first serious 3D project and I had to deal with many "holes" in my knowledge I now hopefully filled up :)

So be prepared of a new post in the "My projects" forum the next days...

Greetings,
Dirk