Tomorrow's Games, Today

Just before the GDCA announced Portal was this year's GOTY, a lesser known event had taken place on the same stage. The IGF rewarded independent or indie developers for the games they had created in 2007. Where's the hype, where's the drama, where's the relevance? Well, a couple of years ago, a team of students got recognized by the IGF for a little project that was to become the now much-loved Portal.

The winner of the main prize of the evening, the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, was Crayon Physics Deluxe, made by Kloonygames. It lets you draw solutions to puzzles and see them as they become animated within the game world. There's a Crayon Physics already out, but it's just small taste of what Kloonygames, with their "Monthly experimental games" tag-line, are aiming to achieve.

Audiosurf is a game that's going to be your MP3 library's best friend. It is basically a puzzle game based on retrieving sets of 3 crystals, but it does this on a game track and with the sequence of crystals based on the BPM of a song that you choose. With its simple and addictive gameplay, it took home Excellence in Audio and the Audience Award.

World of Goo got the awards for Best Innovation and for Technical Excellence. The game itself seems reminiscent of the Lemmings series, with better psychics and a more coherent world. Fez, a game about a character wearing a fez who discovers that his 2D platform world is in fact 3D world, received the Excellence in Visual Art award.

Most of the games that received prizes are not yet well known, with the exception of Audiosurf, which seems to be making a run for attention. Nevertheless, the gameplay and the innovation that they contain are very interesting and break out of the somewhat constrained world of big-budget games. As proved already by Portal, such a good idea can be picked by a larger game studio and it then has the chance to become one of the most played and most acclaimed games of the year. That's why the Independent Games Festival matters.