Meet the IGF's art and audio jurors for 2013

Organizers of the 2013 Independent Games Festival are pleased to announce the latest additions to its discipline-specific jury panels that will determine the finalists and winner of its various awards. The jury announcements for this year are beginning with some of the industry professionals, independent game notables and former IGF award winners that will make up its Excellence in Visual Art and Excellence in Audio Awards. The latest jury rundown following prior announcements of its Nuovo and debut Narrative Award jurists, as well as this year's Design and Technical Excellence juries. The Excellence in Visual Art Award The Visual Art award is a category which seeks to highlight the innovation and quality in visuals for indie games. Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Visual Art award have been entrants which featured impressive displays of the craft of games, including The Behemoth's vibrant cartoon-ish beat-em-up Castle Crashers, Polytron's 2D/3D "trixel"-based puzzle platformer Fez, Amanita Design's hand-painted adventure game Machinarium, Playdead's equal parts soft and stark monochromatic puzzler Limbo, and thechineseroom's ambient first-person exploration game Dear Esther. The jury consists of the following: - Grant Duncan (founding member & artist on Hello Games' IGF finalist Joe Danger) - Jen Zee (Supergiant Games art director on games including Bastion) - Jakub Dvorsky (founder, Amanita Design, creators of multiple IGF award winning games like Samorost, Machinarium & Botanicula) - Ben Esposito (independent artist & designer, most recently level designer of The Unfinished Swan) - Sara Gross (independent illustrator and artist on games like Oregon Whale) - Beth Maher (illustrator, designer and developer of games like Kreayshawn: the Game) - Steven Burgess (former designer of Frontier's LostWinds, now working with Hello Games on the iOS version of Joe Danger) - Kelly Smith (artist & animator at Capy on games including Critter Crunch & Clash of Heroes) - Richard Hogg (artist on Honeyslug games including Poto & Cabenga, Frobisher Says & IGF finalist Hohokum) - Patrick Smith (as 'Vectorpark', creator of games & interactive toys like Windosill, Feed the Head & Levers) The Excellence In Audio Award The Excellence in Audio Award is a category which seeks to highlight the best musical and sound innovation, quality, and impressiveness in independent gaming. Prior finalists and winners of the IGF Excellence in Audio award have gone out to games which took an entirely new and unique to approach to sound in games or otherwise excelled at their craft, including Queasy Games' abstract acoustic guitar shooter Everyday Shooter, PixelJunk Eden from Q-Games and Osaka musician/DJ Baiyon, and Amanita Design's delightful & charming adventure Botanicula. The jury includes the following: - Shaw-Han Liem (co-creator and audio lead of Queasy Games' Sound Shapes, performs as I Am Robot And Proud) - Darren Korb (audio lead at Bastion creators Supergiant Games) - David Lloyd & Larry Oji (respectively, musician and founder of game music site OverClocked ReMix; OCR head and soundtrack director on Capcom's Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix.) - Emily Ridgway (music director and audio designer on games like BioShock, Brutal Legend & Costume Quest) - Laura Shigihara (composer, developer, and singer-songwriter best known for her work on Plants Vs. Zombies) - Damien Kastbauer (audio designer with credits on games including XCOM, Uncharted, Rock Band, Drawn To Life, and Sam & Max) - Kristen Quebe (audio designer with credits on games including Condemned, Fable & Halo) All entries in the 2013 Independent Games Festival Main Competition are currently browsable at the IGF's official site, where you can also soon find more complete biographical information on all of this year's juries, as more are announced over the next few weeks. (The IGF is part of the UBM Tech Game Network, as is this website.) Main Competition finalists will be announced -- along with a jury statement detailing the thought process behind selecting its lineup -- on Monday, January 7th 2013, with the winner announced on the evening of March 27th at the live-streamed, multi-thousand person attended IGF Awards ceremony during GDC 2013 -- for which registration is now open.