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Former IGF Awards host Andy Schatz (pictured above) got to take the stage again tonight, only this time it was to accept both the Seumas McNally award and the Excellence in Design Award for his 4-player co-op stealth game Monaco. Other winning games included the long-lost Limbo, which won awards for Visual Art and Technical Excellence, Closure, which won Audio, and cactus’s Tuning, which won the Nuovo Award.

You can view the entire show here.

Seumas McNally Grand Prize:

• Joe Danger
• Monaco
• Rocketbirds: Revolution!
• Super Meat Boy!
• Trauma

Excellence in Visual Art:

• Limbo
• Owlboy
• Rocketbirds: Revolution!
• Shank
• Trauma

Excellence in Audio:

• Closure
• Rocketbirds: Revolution!
• Shatter
• Super Meat Boy!
• Trauma

Excellence in Design:

• AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!—A Reckless Disregard For Gravity
• Cogs
• Miegakure
• Monaco
• Star Guard

Nuovo Award:

• A Slow Year
• Closure
• Enviro-Bear 2000
• Today I Die
• Tuning

Technical Excellence:

• Closure
• Limbo
• Heroes of Newerth
• Joe Danger
• Vessel

Student Showcase:

• Boryokudan Rue
• Continuity
• Devils Tuning Fork
• Dreamside Maroon Student Version
• Igneous
• Paper Cakes
• Puddle
• Puzzle Bloom
• Spectre
• Ulitsa Dimitrova

Cactus gave the best IGF acceptance speech I’ve ever heard! Continue reading

[In the latest of an occasional series of demoscene-related posts on GameSetWatch, AteBit's Paul 'EvilPaul' Grenfell presents a multi-part retrospective on 2009's best demos - continuing with the best 'wild demos' - some of the more out-there efforts from the scene last year. Previously: best demos, best 64kb/4kb intros, and best oldschool demos.]

After a bit of a break, I'm back with more of my favourite demoscene productions from 2009. This time I'm looking into the Wild category. Wild is a bit of an odd category whose definition often depends on the demo party you're attending.

At most parties, though, Wild means anything that doesn't fit into any of other competition or category. This usually includes demos on really obscure or home-made hardware as well as live-action, animated or CG short films. I'm also going to extend this definition to include some tiny intros that were too small to fit into the 4k chart.

1st: Puls by Rrrola

64k demos too big? Can't wait for the next great 4k intro to download? Then try this 256 byte demo from Rrrola. Yup, that's right, this effect was created with just two hundred and fifty six bytes of hand-crafted assembly code. And if that blows your mind, <a href="http://pouet.net/prodlist.php?type[]=256b&order=thumbup&x=25&y=10&page=1&order=thumbup
">check out what other amazing things 256byte demo authors have been up to over the years.

2nd: Untraceable by TBC

Next we take a bit of a leap to 1024 bytes with this 1k fractal exploration from TBC.

3rd: Demovibes 9 mixed by Willbe

I love the Demovibes compilations, expertly compiled and mixed by Willbe, and this edition is no exception. Perfect background music for democoding.

4th: I Felt the Earth Breathing by Quite

"Procedural Graphics" is a fairly recent demoscene category. Authors must write an executable that produces just a single image. So why not just write a program that decompress a jpeg? Because most competitions put a limit of 4096 bytes on the size of the executable. This example from Quite shows just what can be achieved.

5th: Shader Toy by RGBA

IQ of the group RGBA is not just responsible for great demos like the stunning 4k Elevated. He's also maintains a website (www.iquilezles.org) that is an authority of many aspects of democoding. And on top of all that, last year he released Shader Toy - an online tool to lets you edit and preview GLSL shader programs in any WebGL-enabled browser.

6th: Turbulence by LFT

Back after his success with Craft in 2008, Linus "lft" Akesson returns with another home-made demo platform.

7th: Julie by Nuance

Necessity is the mother of invention, they say, and if you can't afford the tech that Hollywood uses to make "bullet-time" effects then you'd better figure out a cheap way to do it yourself. The result is this short film, mixing live and computer generated footage and released by Nuance at Breakpoint 2009. You can also check out the story behind this demo as a PDF document.

8th: The Death Grind by A Halalkoszor

Another short film, though this time it's entirely computer animated.

9th: Subtle Confusion by Pistoke

More computer animation in this humorous piece from Pistoke.

10th: Pixel by Pixel by Outbreak & Darklite

And finally, want to tile your bathroom with a mosaic but can't decide on a pattern? How about starting a topic on the demoscene site Pouet asking for suggestions, picking the best, then filming yourself in time-lapse as you apply the winning image to your walls.

The winners of the AGS Awards 2009 have been announced. These are the best Adventure Game Studio games as voted on by the AGS community. The big winners are Zombiecow’s Time Gentlemen, Please! (Best Game, Best Gameplay, Best Dialogue Writing, Best Non-Player Character), Team Effigy’s The Marionette (Best Original Story, Best Background Art, Best Music, Best Tutorial or Documentation), and Ben304’s Shifters’s Box – Outside In (Best Puzzles, Best Short Game). There are a lot of other games and awards, so check out the award page for the full line-up.

Thanks, bicilotti, for the heads-up. Continue reading

[In the latest of an occasional series of demoscene-related posts on GameSetWatch, AteBit's Paul 'EvilPaul' Grenfell discusses the last ever installment of a seminal demo party.]

It's sad news for anyone who has ever visited it, but the German demoscene party Breakpoint is to come to an end this year. Breakpoint is the world's biggest "demoscene only" demoparty in existance.

This means that the party is aimed squarely at demosceners, and the programme of events includes only demoscene related activities, competitions and seminars. This is in contrast to the biggest combined demoparty, Assembly, which also opens it's doors each year to thousands of gamers.

The party has a reputation for producing incredibly high quality demos from its competitions, many of which go on to become nominees and winners of the prestigious Scene.org awards. Oh, did I mention that the Scene.org awards ceremony is also held annually at Breakpoint? There will certainly be a gap in the demoscene calendar next year!

Amongst a fresh wave of accusations that the demoscene is dying (don't worry, the demoscene has apparently been dying for years - it's a bit of a meme), it is perhaps unsurprising that the theme for this year's party is "Like there's no tomorrow".

Farbrausch have taken these ideas to heart and produced the invitation demo by re-hashing assets from several older demos together into one. Without looking too hard you'll find references to Farbrausch's own The Popular Demo (which won the PC demo competition at the first ever Breakpoint back in 2003) and Debris (another PC demo winner at Breakpoint 2007). Look closer and you might be able to see (and hear) a few more!

The last ever Breakpoint party will take place from the 2nd to the 5th of April in Bingen Am Rhein, Germany. More information, including some news on why there will be no more Breakpoints, can be found over at the official demo party website.

Cleveland's Blockparty returns this April 15th-18th alongside hacker conference Notacon, now in its fourth year running (out of five promised annual editions) -- making this the longest running demoparty in North America to date. To prepare for the show, organizers have set up a Block Party 2010 site with details on the event.

For those of you still unfamiliar with the demoparty concept, Blockparty 2010's organizers break it down: "set up a stage, invite programmers, artists and musicians from around the world to enter competitions, watch in amazement what comes out, and then hand out prizes to the best of the bunch."

As with previous shows, Blockparty 2010 will feature competitions like demo, HiRez, textmode, music, photography, wildcard (generally animated short films or short visual productions) and more. Returning attendees will want to check out the site for info on the new competition machine, rules, and category changes.

The show will also have seminars and presentations like Guybrush's "Proce55ed Synaesthesia for fun and profit". You can find information on registering for Notacon 7 and Blockparty 2010 (around 135 out of 400 tickets are already sold as of this posting) at the Notacon site.

[Via Demoscene.us]

The “Make Something Unreal” mod competition is over after 2 years! The winner of the competition was The Haunted, a multiplayer survival horror game. The creators of this mod will receive $50,000 and a commercial license from Epic Games for Unreal Engine 3.

According to Alexander Bruce, the creator of Hazard – Journey of Life, all 5 grand prize winners are going commercial. I’ve provided videos of each game and links after the jump.

A couple of really cool organizations could use some help:

1. Gamma IV – The fourth iteration of the popular experimental game showcase/dance party, is headed to GDC this year (with over 150 submitted games!). Kokoromi, the show’s organizers, have started a Kickstarter project to help pay for the new venue and hardware for the event. All proceeds will go toward the event and backers can receive a number of sweet goodies donated by other indies (games, GDC passes, soundtracks, comics, etc.).

2. Giant Robot – This might seem slightly out of place, as Giant Robot is an indie Asian pop culture magazine and not an indie game magazine, but GR has hosted a number of fantastic game galleries, and is helping realize LA Game Space, a non-profit “game lab” that seeks to involve children in Los Angeles with game-making and game-makers. The magazine’s creators, Eric and Martin, are asking for donations to help offset the rising cost of print. Again, there is the possibility of getting some great donation gifts if you help out.

Even if you’re not interested in donating, you should check out what these guys are up to and see if it interests you! Continue reading