Northway Games is a Canadian independent video game studio consisting of husband-and-wife team Colin and Sarah Northway. They are best known for the game Fantastic Contraption , a puzzle game nominated for the Independent Games Festival Nuovo Award for Innovation in Game Design in 2016, Incredipede , another puzzler, featured at the Tokyo Game Show's Sense of Wonder Night in 2011 and nominated for the IGF Excellence In Visual Art in 2013, [1] [2] [3] and also the Rebuild strategy series. [4] [5] The two have received some press coverage over their digital nomad lifestyle. [3]
The Independent Games Festival (IGF) is an annual festival at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), the largest annual gathering of the independent video game industry. Originally founded in 1998 to promote independent video game developers, and innovation in video game development by CMP Media, later known as UBM Technology Group, IGF is now owned by Informa after UBM's acquisition.
The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is an annual conference for video game developers. The event includes an expo, networking events, and awards shows like the Game Developers Choice Awards and Independent Games Festival, and a variety of tutorials, lectures, and roundtables by industry professionals on game-related topics covering programming, design, audio, production, business and management, and visual arts.
Reflexive Entertainment was an American video game developer based in Lake Forest, California. The company was cofounded by Lars Brubaker, Ernie Ramirez, James C. Smith and Ion Hardie in 1997. They developed nineteen games independently, published two games, started distribution of downloadable casual games on their online Arcade, created a division of their Arcade entirely devoted to Mac games for Mac users and started hosting ad supported free online web browser games. In 2005, Reflexive's Wik and the Fable of Souls won three awards at the 2005 Independent Games Festival which included Innovation in Visual Art, Innovation in Game Design and the Seumas McNally Award For Independent Game Of The Year. In October 2008, Reflexive Entertainment was acquired by Amazon.com. On February 3, 2009, Amazon.com began hosting casual game content for internet download.
Digital Eel is a self-funded independent video game development team located in the Seattle, Washington area. Digital Eel is best known for its Infinite Space series of space roguelikes.
Media Design School is a private tertiary institution that provides specialist industry training in 3D animation and visual effects, game art, game programming, graphic and motion design, digital media artificial intelligence, and creative advertising. It is currently the most awarded private tertiary provider in New Zealand for digital and creative technology qualifications. In 2022, the school was also ranked as New Zealand's #1 and world's #10 Animation School by Animation Career Review, and among the top three creative media and entertainment schools in the Southern Hemisphere by The Rookies.
Fez is a 2012 indie puzzle-platform game developed by Polytron Corporation and published by Trapdoor. The player-character Gomez receives a fez that reveals his two-dimensional (2D) world to be one of four sides of a three-dimensional (3D) world. The player rotates between these four 2D views to realign platforms and solve puzzles. The objective is to collect cubes and cube fragments to restore order to the universe.
The Graveyard is a computer art game developed by Belgian developer Tale of Tales in which the player assumes the role of an elderly woman walking through a graveyard to a bench.
Fantastic Contraption is a Flash-based physics game created by Canadian indie developer Colin Northway, released September 16, 2008. Northway sold the rights to the game to inXile Entertainment who released the game for iOS on January 26, 2009. A sequel, Fantastic Contraptions 2, was released July 27, 2010. It was released for iOS on November 5, 2010. In February 2015 inXile entertainment discontinued their Sparkworkz web-games division, ending all server support for the games. Colin Northway has expressed interest in reviving the games, and potentially releasing an upgraded version.
Vlambeer is a Dutch independent video game developer based in Utrecht. Founded in 2010, the studio was composed of Rami Ismail and Jan Willem Nijman. The studio is known for the games Super Crate Box (2010), Serious Sam: The Random Encounter (2011), Ridiculous Fishing (2013), Luftrausers (2014), and Nuclear Throne (2015), as well as for their stand against video game cloning.
Incredipede is a physics-based puzzle video game by Canadian studio Northway Games. The game was released on 25 October 2012.
Simogo is a Swedish independent video game developer based in Malmö. The company was founded in 2010 and is best known for creating games for mobile devices, including Year Walk and Device 6. Its name comes from the name of its founders Simon (SIM), and Gordon (GO); the 'O' from the Swedish word "och" meaning "and".
Starling is an open source game framework used to create 2D games that run both on mobile and desktop platforms. It recreates the traditional Flash display list architecture on top of accelerated graphics hardware. Several commercial games have been built with Starling, including Angry Birds Friends and Incredipede.
The Seumas McNally Grand Prize is the main award given at the Independent Games Festival (IGF), an annual event that takes place during the Game Developers Conference, one of the largest gatherings of the indie video game industry. The award is named after computer game programmer Seumas McNally (1979–2000), founder of independent game development company Longbow Digital Arts. McNally died of Hodgkin's lymphoma shortly after receiving the award, then just the IGF Grand Prize, in 2000 for his game Tread Marks. The award is given alongside a prize of US$30,000.
Lucas Pope is an American video game designer. He is best known for experimental indie games, notably Papers, Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, both of which won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize alongside other awards.
Fantastic Contraption is a room scale virtual reality video game for the HTC Vive and PlayStation VR in which players construct machines from building materials to meet challenges. It was released at the HTC Vive's launch on April 5, 2016 and was released for PlayStation VR in July 2017.
Lumino City is a puzzle adventure video game developed and published by State of Play Games. The game was released for OS X and Windows in December 2014, for iOS in October 2015., and Android for 12 April 2017. It is a sequel to Lume.
Michael Brough is a New Zealand-born indie video game developer known for his eclectic roguelike games. His games are often tightly-focused explorations of a single mechanical aspect of the roguelike genre, set on unusually small grids. This style of game, perhaps best exemplified by 868-HACK, has become widely known as the "Broughlike".
Enviro-Bear 2000 is a 2009 video game by Canadian independent developer Justin Smith. The game is a mixture of action, racing and survival genres as the player, who is a bear, attempts to drive a car around a forest to collect enough food to hibernate for the winter.
The Nuovo Award or Innovation Award is an award given at the Independent Games Festival (IGF), an annual event that takes place during the Game Developers Conference, one of the largest gatherings of the indie video game industry. The award is given to honor "abstract, shortform, and unconventional game development which advances the medium and the way we think about games". The award was designed as a way for art games to compete with traditional indie games, and the winner was originally selected from a group of finalists and given a prize of US$2,500. In 2011, the IGF increased the prize money to US$5,000 due to the increased quality of the entries.