Cart Life, FTL: Faster Than Light, Little Inferno take home IGF awards

Cart Life, Richard Hofmeier’s realistic, sometimes heart-breaking game about food cart workers trying to achieve their dreams, earned the Seumas McNally Award for Best Independent Game and its associated $30,000 cash prize this evening at the 15th Annual Independent Games Festival, hosted by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. In addition to winning the Grand Prize, Cart Life also won the Best Narrative Award and the Nuovo Award for abstract and unconventional games, an impressive sweep for a sometimes deliberately obtuse title that was relatively underappreciated before the IGF Awards season. The other IGF multi-award winner for the evening was acclaimed space strategy title FTL: Faster Than Light by Subset Games. FTL was helped to prominence by an IGF China nomination early in its development and was honored with both the Excellence in Design Award and the Audience Award. Other IGF award recipients for 2013 include Tomorrow Corporation’s quirky title about burning objects in an ‘entertainment fireplace,’ Little Inferno, which won the Technical Excellence Award. Surreal magical realist adventure game Kentucky Route Zero by Cardboard Computer won the Excellence in Visual Art award for its beautifully designed environments, and Jeppe Carlsen’s beat-based platformer 140 won the Excellence in Audio Award. Finally, the Best Student Game was awarded to the third-person, high-speed skating game that celebrates Twitter and cell phone culture, Zineth, by the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, picked from another strong set of student game finalists. All finalists and winners for this year’s competition are playable at the Game Developers Conference at the IGF Pavilion on the GDC Expo Floor in San Francisco’s Moscone Center through Friday, March 29. The IGF awarded the following games as winners of its 15th Annual Awards: Excellence in Visual Art ($3,000) Kentucky Route Zero (Cardboard Computer) Nuovo Award ($5,000) Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier) Excellence in Audio ($3,000 ) 140 (Jeppe Carlsen) Excellence in Narrative ($3,000) Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier) Technical Excellence ($3,000) Little Inferno (Tomorrow Corporation) Best Student Game ($3,000) Zineth (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) Audience Award ($3,000) FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games) Excellence in Design ($3,000) FTL: Faster Than Light (Subset Games) Seumas McNally Grand Prize ($30,000) Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier) The Independent Games Festival – which also included a two-day Independent Games Summit on Monday, March 25th and Tuesday, March 26th as part of GDC – was established in 1998 by the UBM Tech Game Network to encourage the rise of independent game development and to recognize the best independent game titles, in the same way that the Sundance Film Festival has honored the independent film community. Organizers would like to thank this year's kind supporters of the IGF, including Microsoft Studios (Platinum Sponsor), Valve (Platform Sponsor), DigiPen Institute of Technology (Platinum Student Showcase Sponsor), and Le Cnam ENJMIN (Gold Student Showcase Sponsor). The IGF offers finalists both global exposure and more than $50,000 in cash prizes to each year’s winners, in addition to a guaranteed slot on Valve’s Steam distribution service for Main Competition finalists and a one year subscription to the Microsoft Development Network for winners. For more information about the IGF, and its finalists and winners, please visit the official website. Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech.