Feedback from the IGF

[BS-er]

I received this e-mail from an IGF representative:

Dear Robert N. Stewart Jr.,

Firstly, thank you for entering the 2009 Independent Games Festival!  The standards were extremely high this year, and we only had five finalist slots per scoring category.  Please accept our commiserations if you didn't make the finalists.  Whether you did or not, though, our esteemed panel of judges (http://www.igf.com/judges.html) left literally hundreds of game ratings and tried to comment on as many games as possible.

Machines_Anarchy_and_Destruction scored best in:  Technical

And scored worst in:  Audio

Keep in mind you are more than welcome to enter your game in next year's IGF.  Feel free to email chairman@igf.com if you have any questions.  And if you'll be at the Game Developer's Conference or Independent Games Summit (Monday/Tuesday at the GDC), I look forward to meeting you!

Best Regards,
Matthew Wegner
Content Director
Independent Games Festival

I definitely agree that the MAD IGF entry was strongest in technical aspects, and weakest in audio.  The sound effect clips for the game are fairly poor, even though I spent hundreds of hours searching for and mixing the sounds.  Developing sound effects suitable for a combat game like this turned out to be no easy task.

[CivBase]

Dang... I didn't think the audio was too bad; but yah, it does lack in that department.

[Lizard]

personally I think the IGF submission was a bit of a mistake for a couple of reasons, mainly because M.A.D. was nowhere near mature enough to warrant a submission it lacked polish in all areas not only the audio, working on the IGF submission also shifted the focus of development and I'm not sure that was a good thing either.


I was never all that enthusiastic about the IGF thing and I think on the whole it was a bit of a wasted effort, I don't think M.A.D. is the sort of game that the IGF judges were looking for, I think M.A.D. probably relies too much on traditional elements at the core of it's gameplay and IGF winners tend to be quirky and quite original games.

[Black Manatee]

I don't know if it shifted the focus of development or not, but there's no denying that it speeded development a lot!  Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is hard to say sometimes, but I do think that deadlines in general--especially for creative projects--tend to really help push things along.

I agree about the IGF not necessarily being the perfect venue for MAD to compete in, but I disagree that it was a wasted effort.  I agree that we almost certainly would have lost (Lizard's right on-target about the quirkiness factor), but I'm convinced that the game would have made it into the finals if it were completed to anywhere near the standards that Bob and the rest of us would have liked (a process that might not even be complete this year, either).  And if we made it into the finals, the contacts and experience and networking could prove invaluable for a talented but inexperienced team that lacked connections and industry expertise/support.

And that, I think, is the real purpose of the IGF.