Final Fleet, Our new VR Space Shooter for Steam VR, is officially in competition at the 19th annual Independent Game Festival. You can visit the Final Fleet competition page or view all of the IGF submission games at the IGF website. Hope to see some of you at GDC!
It’s official. Fist Puncher is in the mix at the 14th annual IGF this Spring in San Francisco. Visit
the Fist Puncher IGF page for more details. This year’s competition will include nearly 570 games! If nothing else, the indie scene is bursting at the seams. Congrats in advance to everyone else who put in those long, seemingly endless hours to get their game submitted before the deadline. Check out www.McFunkypants.com for a complete rundown of all 568 IGF games with thumbnails.
Let’s go back in time for a minute, way back in time. The first video game I can remember ‘making’ was a slot machine simulator on a Texas Instruments TI-994A computer. I put ‘making’ in quotes because I think I copied the BASIC code out of the instruction manual. Still, it was a great feeling seeing those cherries get drawn on our black and white tv because I had taken the time to do the data entry that would make it happen.
Through the years I made, or attempted to make, countless games on my own. JM Invaders, Trojan Horse (honorable mention at the East Troy middle school science fair), monochrome Batman, a Tetris clone, and international tennis with player names that sounded suspiciously like Boris Becker and Michael Chang. After high school I got away from making games, I moved to California and decided there were better ways to spend my time.
About five years ago I felt the urge to transition from making electronic music to a more mature artistic pursuit. I found all these free tools to make video games, and fell in love with rudimentary computer animations all over again. Whether or not video games were a more mature outlet or a step back towards my youth, I invested seemingly endless hours with AGS and Gamemaker trying to create games that matched the tone of my Ableton mixes.
Being a bit of a hermit, I had no idea the indie games phenomenon was exploding all around me. I stumbled upon XNA and started working on an Xbox Live Indie Game to focus my efforts. An internet search one night introduced me to the Independent Games Festival (IGF). Living in the Santa Cruz mountains, I couldn’t believe my good fortune to find such a prestigious indie game event was taking place in my own backyard. I slicked my hair back, combed my beard and took a day off work to experience the GDC floor and the IGF.
9 months later Fist Puncher has been submitted to the IGF, the first attempt at competing with the most talented competetion the world of indie games can offer. Limbo, Castle Crashers, Octodad, BITTRIP.RUNNER, Monaco, Bastion, Retro City Rampage, World of Goo… I could go on and on with the amazing titles that the IGF has honored over the years. This year the storylines range from Fez to Pirate Kart to Twitter flame wars. For us, Fist Puncher is the story. I pushed myself right up to the midnight 10/17 deadline and uploaded the best game I could. Win or lose, nothing could be more exhilarating than entering and competing with the best. Thanks IGF!
– Jake