IGF Mobile Announced, Open for Submissions

By: Derek Yu

On: September 7th, 2007

The Independent Games Festival is announcing the first ever indie mobile competition to promote handheld games and developers! That includes everything from cellphones to Palm to DS and PSP. Actually, they seem pretty open about what a handheld device is, so presumably some prankster could submit a pencil and a Post-It with an empty Tic-Tac-Toe grid on it… don’t do it!

The prizes for the competition total $20,000, with a $10,000 Grand Prize and a host of other major prizes for innovation and great execution in mobile game development. The deadline to enter the competition is Monday, October 22nd 2007, and judges will be trying playable version of all games submitted.

The submission fee is $25.

Posted in Community, Competitions, Developers, IGF / GDC

OrR

Great! I love everything handheld. :)
Rz.

october 22 is my birthday. :3
Nikica

Nice, offtopic: Tim has posted many intresting news, so it would be good to see them on TIGSource too, here is one of them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUbY0CGH0y0
Xander

The Gish video I realise is only two weeks in development, so clearly not long at all, but I’m just not sure exactly what can be delivered from the sequel to a game that was so important because it was unique. If it’s simply an update with better graphics (though fantastic lighting… I wish I could just play around with that all day) then I’m not sure how I’m going to take to it. More Gish would be great, but I’m just not sure what it’s going to do to make me want it more than the original.

Go on Cryptic Sea, Tease Me. Tease Me Now.
Dan MacDonald

People who play mobile games don’t actually care about games. Just look at the top 10 lists for mobile games. It’s all games played by people who don’t pay attention to game media or game competitions. I can’t see contest adding a huge amount of value TBH.
Twistedrabbit

I put all my money on a DS game to win it. (Puts whats left over on psp cus i love locoroco)
simonc

Dan, there’s a lot of interesting possibilities, though, and not just on PSP and DS, as I said on GameSetWatch:

“There are two or three angles from which this sister IGF competition should be good for indie developers. Firstly, there really are some great overlooked cellphone games out there – from developers like Capybara Games and others – which these awards should highlight in the context of GDC and the Independent Games Festival. Secondly, there’s the DS, PSP and other handhelds angle – and there are plenty of prototypes or homebrew-like games out there which deserve honoring – heck, maybe that Shantae DS title I was drooling over the other day will enter.

Finally – and this is the particularly interesting ‘augmented’ angle – there are all kinds of cool game design things you can do if you have a handheld device and other add-ons such as GPS, a camera, Internet connectivity and so on.

A few examples from games big and small – Final Fantasy: Before Crisis for cellphones had a camera-based materia collecting feature, in which: “The goal is to photograph something that contains the predefined colors that will produce new materia. For example, photographing something that is predominantly red will yield a Fire materia.” Awesome idea. Elsewhere, there’s other neat concepts like the solar sensor in Konami’s Boktai and even Gizmondo’s (!) augmented reality project, using the camera and overlaying computer-generated art based on a grid.

Encouraging innovative projects like these – which actually take advantage of the fact that you’re holding the game device and carrying it around – is why Nvidia signed up to be a multi-year sponsor and help give out the money to deserving games – who knows, maybe games like these will be created just so they can enter IGF Mobile in subsequent years? Hopefully so!”
Dan MacDonald

Ah, I may have read too fast. If it includes handhelds like the DS and PSP (which are often considered a different market then “mobile”) then there could be some good things coming from this.
Moose

Ugh, that’s dreadful.

Essentially, including the DS and PSP harpoons the entire “real” indie market. You can’t get development kits for DS or PSP unless you’re already an established name in the mainstream industry and those platforms have so many advantages when it comes to developing games that anyone working on one of the more open mobile platforms will be hamstrung from the start.
OrR

“People who play mobile games donâ€™t actually care about games. Just look at the top 10 lists for mobile games.”

Um… What’s your point? Look at the top 10 lists for console or PC games. Are they any less depressing? There are awesome games on handhelds and phones and there are people who love them. Of course the crappy puzzle and license games win commercially like everywhere else. But that’s probably the point of this competition: Encouraging developers to make some good games.

The only real difference between PSP/DS and the others is that there is a commercial market for indies on the other devices while it’s hard to break into PSP/DS.
simonc

Moose, I think the rules are open enough to allow DS ‘homebrew’, at least, to enter – and the IGF has shown time and time again that innovative games can come from any platform and from any size developer.
Dan MacDonald

OrR:

I developed mobile games for about a year and worked on some IP you would recognize. I’ve worked on all kinds of phones from OGL/ES HW accelerated ones to Nokia S30’s.

In brief, phones are a horrible platform to game on. Their screens, their audio, their keys just aren’t designed for anything beyond bejeweled (as evidenced by mobile top 10’s).

Anyone who REALLY cares about gaming is going to have a DS or PSP. The only people who buy casual games, do it as a novelty or because they don’t care enough to go get a real gaming device.

What evidence do I have to support this? Gamespot, for example.. got on the mobile bandwagon started running reviews and generating content for mobile games. They didn’t get any traffic and ended up canceling the whole thing, there simply wasn’t enough demand for it. Ubisoft recently devested from the mobile games industry selling it’s stake in gameloft.

Games on cellphones are just another classic example of an industry trying to sell a technology/platform instead of a solution.

Mobile phones are not a good gaming solution, just like WAP wasn’t a good web browsing solution. MobilePhone gaming just like WAP (out side of a few exceptions like bejeweled) isn’t going to see much success on mobile phones.

We’ve seen it peak and it’s only going to go downhill from here as content makers realize it’s not the panacea the industry made it out to be.

(no matter how much effort nVidia puts into selling and promoting mobile graphics HW acceleration chips)