For game enthusiasts who may find themselves in the greater Los Angeles area, you'll be lucky enough to have access to indie game exhibitions for a nominal entrance fee. That means more than two dozen selected independent games, all of which will be on hand at the Wonderful World of Art Gallery, Culver Hotel Mezzanine and Gregg Fleishman Gallery daily from 10 AM to 7 PM.

Also attending this year's IndieCade will be game development luminaries such as Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, Will Wright, Henry Jenkins, Jenova Chen and many, many more. Some will even give thrilling keynote speeches! Hearing those in real-time might cost you a little more.

More information on IndieCade 2009 is available at the official site. I'll be there. Will you?

IndieCade 2009 [Official Site]

Yesterday I wandered over to the quiet indiecade corner of E3 to check out Snapshot and talk to its two man development team, Kyle Pulver and Peter Jones.

The game is a side-scrolling platformer with a unique twist. At any time, you can take pictures of objects in the environment to capture them, and then re-release them from the photos to assist you in completing the levels.

For example, you can take a picture of a walking purple elephant and then re-release it, by positioning the photo on the screen, to help you push a heavy box onto a button switch. You can then recapture the elephant by simply taking another photo.

The same mechanic applies to moving crates, doors, and almost anything in the level. You can even stack items into a pile and snap a shot to hold multiple objects in one picture.

Gameplay is made more challenging with "no photo" zones and limits put on how many photos you can hold at a time.

The game is currently a PC demo that Kyle and Peter are showcasing to gain enough support to make a full blown version of the game, hopefully on multiple platforms.

"Snapshot" has unlimited gameplay possibilities and I can't wait to see this game progress.

By Kotaku Contest Winner Josiah Munsey

This will be the first U.S. preview of games for IndieCade, whose inaugural festival was last year. Stephanie Barish, the IndieCade president, touted the entries by noting last year's expo showcased game makers who reached deals with the big three console makers, so, expect to see more of the same quality.

"This year there will be even more opportunities to inspire the industry and cultural institutions with games that turn our idea of play inside out, that keep fans engaged – and do it passionately, on small budgets, and in innovative ways," she said in a statement.

No games were specifically mentioned for this event, but if they're any indication, you can get a look at last year's selections here.

Both competitions invite unpublished indie developers to bring any kind of game they'd care to develop to the table — shooters, casual, puzzle or whatever. PAX requires that the game at least be in beta and not require any third party software installation to run the game (with some exceptions). IndieCade is a little more chill, allowing mods or software installs — and their only "level of completeness" requirement is one playable level.

The payoff, though, is where it is for many indie game developers. PAX 10 arguably has more prestige (and you get four free passes to the expo), but IndieCade has the more "serious business" ring to it. Still — neither rule set says you can't submit your game to both, so what are you waiting for?

The submission deadline for PAX 10 is May 9 and IndieCade is midnight on April 30.

The PAX 10 Is Open For Submissions [PennyArcade]
IndieCade: The International Festival of Independent Games 09 [IndieCade]

The festival takes place at Open Satellite in Bellevue, Washington. Hit the jump for more details on this much-deserved showcase for independent game developers.

IndieCade: the International Festival of Independent Games announces first stand-alone international independent gaming event in the US open to the public

LOS ANGELES, September 29, 2008 – IndieCade today announced its flagship festival, the culmination and celebration of its annual competition, IndieCade: the International Festival of Independent Games will take place at the Open Satellite contemporary gallery in Bellevue, Washington, October 10-17, 2008. This marks an important moment for independent games as it will be the first stand-alone international independent gaming event in the United States entirely open to the public.

IndieCade: the International Festival of Independent Games will open with an action-packed two-day preview event that will launch a weeklong interactive exhibition open to the general public. The opening events will include artist talks, salon discussions, master classes, celebration, entertainment, preview screenings, and an awards celebration where celebrity jurors will select the top five games from the more than two dozen top finalists on exhibition.

Speakers and topics include strategic game design by Geoff Zatkin, who will use the industry research conducted by his company Electronic Entertainment Design and Research to guide independent gamemakers to critical success; Jenova Chen (flOw) and Jeep Barnett (Portal) will lead a discussion on the road from Indie to Mainstream and the creative implications of traveling it; and on behalf of thatgamecompany, he will hold a special open screening of Flower. Other program highlights include a round-table discussion on the need for innovation with alternate reality game pioneer Elan Lee, as well as celebrity jurors and artist’s talks by the featured finalists.

A panel of internationally renowned jurors selected the 26 featured games named finalists for this year’s festival from among hundreds of submissions to IndieCade. These reflect the breadth and depth of the independent games field, including some that deliberately defy the conventions of mainstream gaming. IndieCade finalists will be announced on the website throughout the month leading up to the festival; previous announcements have included the U.S. premiere of Dark Room Sex Game, a two-player audio installation using the Wiimote to explore the metaphor and mechanic of sex; The Night Journey, by MacArthur-winning video and installation artist Bill Viola in collaboration with Tracy Fullerton, exploring themes of spiritual enlightenment; the rusty, metallic adventure game Machinarium, by the makers of Samarost; Jonathan Söderström’s multi-genre compilation Cactus Arcade; Julian Oliver’s wildly innovative reality spatial puzzler, levelHead, and Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, where players head out into the streets armed with a handheld computer mounted on their bicycle handlebars. Divergent in form and subject, games will span the predictable, the unexpected, and more.

IndieCade @ Open Satellite follows IndieCade’s first Asian showcase in Hangzhou, China held earlier this year from April 28th through May 3rd, for the CICAF animation festival’s audience of almost 500,000 people; IndieCade’s successful showcase in July 2008 at the E3 Business & Media Summit for industry insiders; IndieCade’s showcase of live alternate reality and big games at Penny Arcade Expo, and an extensive upcoming showcase being planned for the public-facing E for All Expo in October. Other upcoming events this year include the focus on European games and gamemakers at IndieCade @ GameCity in the UK.

What: IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games

Where: Open Satellite, 989 112 Ave NE, Suite 102 Bellevue, WA 98004

When: October 10-17, 2008

Attendees: Open to gamemakers, industry, media, and the general public

About IndieCade

IndieCade supports independent game development and organizes a series of international festivals and showcase exhibitions for the future of independent games. It encourages, publicizes, and cultivates innovation and artistry in interactive media, helping to create a public perception of games as rich, diverse, artistic, and culturally significant. IndieCade’s events and related production and publication programs are designed to bring visibility to and facilitate the production of new works within the emerging independent game movement. Like the independent developer community itself, IndieCade’s focus is global; it includes producers in Asia, Europe, Australia, and wherever independent games are made and played. IndieCade was formed by Creative Media Collaborative, an alliance of industry producers and leaders founded in 2005. Advisors to IndieCade include Dave Perry, Will Wright, Eric Zimmerman, Neil Young, Tracy Fullerton, and Keita Takahashi, among many other storied industry veterans and rebels. http://www.indiecade.com

###

During my practically nonexistent downtime, I wandered down to check out the offerings at the E3 installation of Indiecade 2008. Indiecade is, as the name implies, a celebration of a variety of indie games ranging from 'art games' to more mainstream-type titles. We've covered at least two of the games here on Kotaku — Jason Rohrer's Gravitation and The Odd Gentlemen's The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (begun as an MFA thesis at the University of Southern California). I had a chance to check out some of the games, talk to the people behind Indiecade, and watch the goings on — which included a surprising amount of hubbub and talent scouts from several companies lurking around. And there was more than just games: art prints were featured from various games (I even spied a screen from Blueberry Garden), plus videos of ARGs and installation games. My impressions and some pictures after the jump.

The playable games at this year's exhibition spanned an incredibly wide range:

• Bumper Stars, a Facebook app by Large Animal Games, described as "a deliciously addictive cocktail of pinball, pool, and fruit."
• Democracy 2 by Positech Games, a political simulation/strategy game.
• The Graveyard by Tale of Tales, "more like an explorable painting than a game" about an old lady who visits a graveyard.
• Gravitation by Jason Rohrer, about "mania, melancholia, and the creative process."
• ibb and obb by Richard Boeser, a cooperative game for two (and too damn cute).
• Jojo's Fashion Show 2 by Gamelab, a matching game (and one of the more mainstream titles).
• The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, a time-bending puzzle game featuring Victorian landscapes and mincemeat pie. And lots and lots of Winterbottoms.
• levelHead by Julian Oliver, which uses a solid plastic cube as its only interface. On screen, each face of the cube appears to be a room (all connected by doors) and players tilt and move the cube in an attempt to find an exit for the character.

As the list shows, Indiecade is dealing with a lot of different kinds of games — from the art games to the commercial games to all the types in between. I wandered around and had a lot of fun watching people play, especially the games with particularly unique mechanics (like levelHead). While my first visit down to the Indiecade corner of the exhibition hall was met with a reasonably subdued scene, it grew progressively more crowded through the day as more and more people gathered to take a look at the games.

One of the nice points about Indiecade is that you have a reasonably high likelihood of getting to chat with the game developers as you look at and play their games. I took the opportunity to talk at some length with Matt Korda (lead designer, lead artist and programmer) and Paul Bellezza (producer) about their game, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. Matt and Paul are both recent graduates of USC's Interactive Media MFA program, and P.B. Winterbottom started as a thesis project ('we wanted to combine Buster Keaton with Back to the Future'), but is now being shopped around to publishers. Having written about the postmortem of the game, I was curious to try my hand at it — I was initially struck by the resemblance to Braid, since it too features a sort of time mechanic presented as filming the action going on. As I worked further through the demo, though, I was pleased to discover the flexibility given to the player in game. In many respects, there is no one 'right' answer to the game; I got to chat about this (as well as game design, academia, the program at USC and a whole host of other issues) with Matt and Paul. Indiecade provides a really nice venue for this sort of interaction, one thing I think is really a plus about the whole event. It's nice to hear about a game from the horse's mouth, and not just via the written word.

I also took some time to chat with Sam Roberts, the Indiecade Festival Director (and former director of the Slamdance festival). We chatted about Indiecade, independent development, and where we may be in five or ten years. Indiecade is a chance to showcase a variety of independent games that are, in many respects, the 'best of the best' — interesting and creative mechanics, fresh designs, and faces different from the usual AAA suspects. The designers and companies aren't going to change the industry overnight, but definitely have a lot to add to the current and future scenes (even if they are flying under the radar in comparison to the 'mainstream'). These aren't just 'pie in the sky' concepts — the playable versions presented were solid and polished pieces of game design. Of course, not all the examples are gunning for mainstream publication (games such as Gravitation, for example), but I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see Winterbottom and others popping up on a console near you in the future. Talent scouts for major companies weren't lurking around simply for the hell of it.

One of the nicest points about Indiecade is the fact that it's impossible to pigeonhole the games into one category (beyond 'indie,' which is in and of itself a rather nebulous label): when I turned from Winterbottom, I was face to face with the casual and commercial Jojo's Fashion Show 2, which was right around the corner from the more experimental levelHead. A wide variety of mechanics, design styles, and purposes were on display, and it made for a really interesting experience. I didn't even play most of the games, preferring to stand back and watch the designers give their talks and walk interested parties through playable portions. One of my particular favorites was the charming two-player game ibb and obb:

A painfully cute game, the real charm is in the gameplay, which requires two players to cooperate through candy-colored levels to finish. It's cute, clever, and creative — that creativity was one of the hallmarks of Indiecade, no matter what sort of form it took. Several of the games offered interesting intermediaries between the oftentimes 'vapid' casual market and more 'hardcore' titles: pick up and play titles that offer more than, say, Bejeweled. For someone like me — who games in cycles, and frequently just doesn't have the time to settle in with hours and hours of playtime — it's nice to see more options popping up that don't involve match 3 or hidden object games.

If you have the chance to check out Indiecade offerings at an expo or show, definitely do so — it's a nice opportunity to check out what's going on in the indie scene and chat with designers about their games. There are going to be installations at the Penny Arcade Expo and E For All, among others, and it's definitely worth taking some time to see what's going on.

Indiecade photos courtesy of Adam Robezzoli.

To be eligible for IndieCade, your game must not have funding from a major publisher .... You can have other deals with these publishers; your game just can't. There is no age requirement for submission.

IndieCade has an inclusive submissions policy and invites submission of all styles and genres of games, including PC, browser-based, casual, puzzle, mobile, ARGs, Big Games and installation-based games (submitted via video if not playable on-site), mods (provided they conform to game engine licensing agreements), serious games, activist games, art games, virtual worlds and "sandbox" style games, and more! We also welcome student games and games developed by universities, schools and non-profit organizations. All entries should have a digital component, but hybrid games are not only welcome, but encouraged. Innovation is the name of the game.

That's quite a lot of options. The submission period closes 11 April; games will be judged by a panel, and finalists will be notified by mid-May.

IndieCade Submissions