More noteworthy devs join IGF 2014's jury panels

The juries behind GDC 2014's Independent Games Festival continue to take form with an exciting lineup of highly lauded developers and industry professionals to decide the finalists for the awards this March. While the juries are still being finalized as we move toward selection of IGF finalists, here are the confirmed jurors for the Excellence in Visual Arts and Excellence in Audio Awards, in alphabetical order (you can see jurors in additional categories here): 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: - Rex Crowle (artist behind Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet2, Tearaway) - Grant Duncan (Hello Games' Joe Danger, No Man's Sky) - Matt Hammill (Asteroid Base's IGF nominated Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime) - Ezra Hanson-White (Memory of a Broken Dimension, Monolith's FEAR 2) - Tasha Harris (Pixar lead franchise artist, past work includes project lead on Double Fine's Costume Quest) - Richard Hogg (artist on Honeyslug games including Poto & Cabenga, Frobisher Says & IGF finalist Hohokum) - Tamas Kemenczy (Cardboard Computer artist behind IGF winner Kentucky Route Zero) - Sean McIlroy (Lucky Frame lead artist, dual nominated IGF games Bad Hotel, Pug Luv Beats) - Patrick Smith (as 'Vectorpark', creator of games & interactive toys like Windosill, Feed the Head & Levers) - Amanda Williams (Tiger Style's Spider, Waking Mars) 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: - Matthew Burns (founder of Shadegrown Games, behind musical shooter Planck) - Kirk Hamilton (Kotaku features editor, artist behind 2009 album, The Exited Door) - Niamh Houston (known as "Chipzel," the creator of Super Hexagon's OST) - Samantha Kalman (Sentris creator, former UX design technologist at Amazon) - Damian Kastbauer (technical sound designer at PopCap, former Game Developer Magazine contributing editor, technical sound design on EA's Dead Space 3) - David Lloyd (musician and founder of game music site OverClocked ReMix) - Larry Oji (OCR head and soundtrack director on Capcom's Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix) - Chris Remo (Double Fine composer, previous works include IGF notables Thirty Flights of Loving, Gone Home) - Emily Ridgway (music director and audio designer on games like BioShock, Brutal Legend & Costume Quest) - Daniel Rosenfeld (known as "C418", the music producer for Minecraft) - Kenneth Young (Media Molecule head of audio) All entries in the 2014 Independent Games Festival 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. Main Competition finalists will be announced -- along with a jury statement detailing the thought process behind selecting its lineup -- in January 2014, with the winners announced on the evening of March 19th at the live-streamed, multi-thousand person attended IGF Awards ceremony during GDC 2014 -- for which registration is now open. GDC, IGF, and Gamasutra are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech