The Sundance of indie gaming, the Indie Games Festival (IGF), has just announced their 9th annual festival and awards program. The festival, started in 1998, is on it’s 9th year of encouraging innovation in game design and development, and continues to offer independent game developers much-needed support and press. The IGF is currently accepting submissions for their main awards category, as well as their mods and student categories. The IGF awards ceremony takes place March 7, 2007 and is always one of the highlights of the annual game developers conference (GDC). Good luck to everyone.

[IGF 2007]

Garage Games have announced the full release of the Torque Game Builder, unofficially known as the Torque 2D engine. With a focus on simplicity, the package features user-friendly editors to manipulate a powerful engine, with features such as animated sprites, special effects system, real world physics, flexible tiles, and a hardware-accelerated 2D rendering graphical engine. With the announcement also comes the addition of the TGB Pro package, which costs a touch more, but gives the user direct access to the TGB and TorqueScript source code.

[Torque Game Builder]

Tray Games has announced their first annual Developer Challenge, a competition to determine the years best “pick up and play” casual game, using the Tray Games multi-player platform. Launched together with Tray’s new developer support site, the Challenge offers a $10,000 Grand Prize.

“This is a great opportunity for developers to explore the possibilities offered by multi-player game play at the scale of a casual game,” says Joe Pantuso, CEO of TrayGames. “We expect to see creative entries that push the edges of current game genres. This challenge gives us the opportunity to promote the capabilities of the TrayGames platform and attract new developers to the idea of producing games for the Network.”

The $10,000 Grand Prize consists of a publishing contract for the winning game with an advance. In addition to the Grand Prize winner, all finalists will be awarded publishing contracts with revenue share and advances attached to them. All Challenge submissions that are accepted for publication will be available to play on the TrayGames Manager.

Deadline for Challenge entries is September 5, 2006.

[Tray Games' Developer Challenge 2006]