Independent Games Festival 2005 Entries Announced

The Independent Games Festival (run by the CMP Game Group, as is Gamasutra.com) has announced its list of entrants for 2005, the seventh annual contest. The awards, to be given out at next year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, exist to 'Reward Innovation In Independent Games,' and there's a total of $40,000 in prizes for the 2005 Festival, including a $15,000 grand prize for both the 'Open' and 'Web/Downloadable' categories, as well as ten other $1,000 awards in visual art, game design, sound, and other categories. There are a total of 81 entries for this year's awards, including Nayantara's online CCG Star Chamber, Chronic Logic's ball-o'-tar platformer Gish, and Digital Eel's forthcoming Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, the sequel to Strange Adventures In Infinite Space, and IGF chairman Alex Dunne commented that "...the quality of the games is definitely impressive this year." The Independent Games Festival also provided statistics for its entries, revealing that the shortest development time for the game was one month, whereas the longest was a massive nine years, and the average IGF entry took 16.7 months, just over $49,000, and 5.1 people to create.