#Plunder panic indiecade free#

#Plunder panic indiecade free#

This is partly due to the proliferation of free tools, like Unity, as well as more game education programs. One of the changes Barish has noticed in the past decade is that the quality of the submissions continues to increase every year. Though it’s grown considerably, Barish says that they want to keep the event somewhat small so that people can connect with one another and it can maintain a community feel. The nominees alone featured developers from Malaysia, Taiwan, France, Denmark, and more. Now each year, it gets over 1,000 submissions from all over the world.

Barish says they received 98 submissions and estimates the total attendance to be about 40 people. When the festival first started 10 years ago, it was tiny. Then we have a group of 450 people who go through all of those games too, as another level of quality assurance and checking and making sure they should be games we’re looking at.” “This committee goes through all of the games, but then we also have a group of about 50 people who also go through all of the games and report back on them and review them. “We have a really rigorous scoring system and jurying system,” said Barish. The process of picking which games become the finalists involves several levels and hundreds of people. IndieCade picks its nominees through a system that’s based partly on academic review and partly on film festivals. “We look for innovation first and foremost, and there are other judging criteria,” said Barish, “But when they looked back this year after selecting the games, with no agenda, they found that more than 50 percent have women in lead roles, and more than 30 percent have minorities or people of color in lead roles, which is really unusual in the game industry.”

The fact that there’s a lot of diversity in those voices it’s because people just haven’t listened to them before.”Įven though diversity isn’t explicitly a criterion in the selection process, Barish says that just by choosing games based on innovation, they’ve ended up showcasing diverse developers. Because what we’re looking for is what’s innovative, what’s on the cutting edge, and what’s new. “We’ve been, all of these years, showing every possible kind of game - every format, every genre,” said Barish. Wells Necessary Games’s Ishmael, a piece of interactive fiction about a young boy in Palestine Nuclear Fishin’ Software’s Four Horsemen, a visual novel about the immigrant experience and Wonderneer’s Somewhere in the South, a survival-horror game about the Underground Railroad. Quite a few games this year addressed social and political issues, such as Tracking Ida, a physical puzzle game that examines the journalistic legacy of Ida B.