Bulletin:

2012 IGF Finalists Announced

The Independent Games Festival has always been my favorite part of GDC. Sure, the technical discussions of the inner-workings of how various game engines work, narrative workshops, and how to render the best shade of gray for you new space marine FPS are cool. But sometimes all I want to know about is some crazy independent games that I’ve never heard about before.

I’ve found in the past that the finalists are usually a good place to start. It limits the roughly 600-strong list of games they got this year, though there are a lot of games on there that are probably really good.

I have heard of most of the Grand-Prize finalists (and have played the earlier versions of Dear Esther and Spelunky), and I think they’re all great picks for the award. There are a lot in the sub-categories that I haven’t heard of, so I’ll probably be checking those out as the date, March 5-9, gets closer.

The full list of finalists and honorable mentions can be found here.