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IndieCade 2009: The finalists
IndieCade 2009 was held in Culver City, CA this past weekend, and the local art galleries and restaurants were filled with independent games and their developers from all over the world. The festival billed itself as the "video game Sundance" and lived up to this self-made reputation, putting 29 different indie games on display, both throughout the weekend and during a Thursday night opening ceremony MC'd by Uncharted 2's Richard Lemarchand (shown above with festival founder Stephanie Barish).We've rounded up the festival's finalists in the gallery below. You may be familiar with a few of them, including Twisted Pixel's The Maw and a selection of well-known iPhone titles, but all of these titles deserve your attention -- and a playthrough!%Gallery-74606%
iPhone is dominating independent gaming
Our friends at Joystiq make a very insightful and very telling discovery: the iPhone more or less owns the finalist list for the 2009 Independent Games Festival Mobile category. 11 of the 14 contestants aren't on the Nintendo DS or PSP -- they're built and played on the iPhone and the iPod touch. The popular Fieldrunners and Igloo Games' Dizzy Bee are standouts, but even innovative games like Galcon and the pseudogame experience Ruben and Lullaby are being honored with nods.Very, very telling -- the relatively low cost of entry into the App Store and the versatility of Apple's SDK makes the iPhone/iPod touch a dream platform for independent game developers, and clearly, even with less than a year of development time, Apple's handheld is making a big splash in the industry. Sure, there's still a few pricing hiccups that need to be worked out to get bigger developers on board in a big way, but for smaller and single person independent game developers, there's never been a better platform on which to make and market your games.
