IGF 2019 Inspirations: 2016 Excellence in Audio award winner Mini Metro!

Organizers are still accepting submissions for the 21st annual Independent Games Festival (IGF), the longest running festival, summit and showcase of independent games! Entries for all IGF categories are being accepted through October 1, 2018, with finalists announced in early January 2019.

Whether you end up winning or not, participating in the IGF is a great way to bring some attention to your work, build camaraderie with your fellow indie devs, and partake in a major celebration of the best in indie games.

To help inspire you, we thought it might be nice to highlight some past IGF winners and showcase what makes them so special. After kicking things off with a look back at Infinite Fall's Night in the Woods, which debuted early in 2017 and went on to pick up multiple award nominations in last year's IGF, today we want to highlight another standout IGF winner: Dinosaur Polo Club's charming 2015 puzzle game Mini Metro! 

First conceived of in 2013, Mini Metro wound up being a charming, minimalistic experience that challenges players to lay out efficient rail networks, replete with trains, rails, and procedurally-generated stations and passengers.

It's a great game, and the audio is especially inviting: crafted by veteran audio wizard Rich "Disasterpeace" Vreeland, Mini Metro's soundscape hums with entrancing melodies and rhythmic beats that are procedurally generated based on what the player is doing and how large their transit system has grown.

It's remarkable work, so remarkable that the game wound up winning the 2016 IGF award for Excellence in Audio, which was accepted onstage in San Francisco by Vreeland and Dinosaur Polo Club cofounder Peter Curry.

"I need to thank Peter, and his bother Rob, and Jamie out in Wellington New Zealand, who gave me the opportunity to work on this amazing game," said Vreeland while accepting the award onstage in 2016. "They reached out to me and wanted a procedural audio system, which is my bread and butter, I love that stuff, so it was super-fun to work with them."

"I'd like to thank Disasterpeace," responded Curry. "He deserves this award; we just gave him this game and he just turned it into this amazing instrument. He just defied all our expectations, it's been amazing."

You can watch their full acceptance speech on Twitch, where the livestreamed 2016 IGF and Game Developers Choice Awards ceremonies are archived. Look at it as inspiration: that could be you on that stage next year!

The IGF is part of the Game Developers Conference 2019, which will take place from March 18th through March 22nd at San Francisco’s Moscone Convention Center. Now that submissions are officially open for IGF 2019, you can refer to our official rules for the IGF Competition in much greater detail.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to drop us an email at chairperson (at) igf.com. Hope you're all having a great year, and we're all looking forward to seeing what you're all preparing for this year's Festival!

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