Hey! IGF Submissions are open! So this'll be the first year IGF is happening and I'm off of twitter, so this means it's time to properly migrate over what is a yearly tradition for me: posting a big post for devs who intend to, or are considering, submitting their games to the Independent Games Festival.
First off, some context because I think a decent portion of the audience is going to be new this year; I've been an IGF Judge for something like the better part of 8-9 years now. I was also a member of the Art Jury last year. I've been doing this long enough that I can speak pretty confidently on what might make you stand out - and what pitfalls you might fall into - as a submittee to IGF. So this post is all about that! Among other things.
Part 1: About IGF
Why Submit?
So, you know, the IGF site can give you a better description of what IGF is - probably one of the longest-running indie awards shows, attached to GDC, somewhat of a weird and opaque beast.
Generally speaking I like to start these off by being up-front: The chances of winning an award are slim. IGF gets, on average, between 400 and 600 games submitted a year, and man is that a lot of games to compete against.
But the key is, I think there's reasons to submit beyond just the prospect of an award or a nomination. IGF's judging and jury pools are stocked with high-profile gamedevs and others who can help you make connections - I know at least one indie publisher whose leadership does igf judging, and while press is just plain less of a thing these days, there are independent press members who check stuff out as well.
I can say from confident experience that people have gotten publishing deals and Indie Megabooth slots at cons from submitting to IGF, without ever getting a nomination. Nothing's ever guaranteed, but I really do think it's worth it if you want to get contemporary eyes on your game. This goes doubly for people whose games are avant-garde enough to fall into the Nuovo award category, which is almost exclusively filled each year with games from solo devs and tiny teams who could never afford a marketing budget.
Frankly, getting a chance to discover and signal-boost games I'd never otherwise have heard of is the vast majority of why I judge IGF at all. If you've seen me screaming on here about Time Bandit and Astronaut: The Best and other games over the last year, those are all games I first played because they submitted to IGF. Anyway, that's my pitch, haha.
Okay, but WHEN should I submit?
This one's a little harder. My general advice is that if you want to get attention and deals, you should be submitting before your PR campaign starts winding up, even if the game is in a fairly unfinished state. My rule of thumb is that if you think what makes it unique and exciting already shines through, that's an excellent time to start building attention.
If you're mostly interested in winning an award, the answer is more like "when it's as close to done as your marketing campaign can stand", lol. Finished games tend to have a slight advantage when it comes to award time, because it can feel unfair to extrapolate from an unfinished build and assume the rest of the game is going to ALSO be good. But, you know, there's always exceptions - Fez and Eastward both got nominated when they were years out from being done.
My game isn't really for money / I don't care about getting a publisher or etc / My thing is weird and niche, will anyone in IGF care?
YES
I'm going to quote my past self here: The pool of judges who's into advocating for weird shit is smaller but we exist and we put in the time. We see you and we love what you do. Please keep doing it.
I truly deeply love the stuff we get from tiny devs just making cool weird shit. I try my best to feature at minimum several in my IGF games threads every year. Trust me when I say yall are my favourite part of the competition every year and consistently my source of biggest surprises and joy. Life Tastes Like Cardboard, Sylvie Lime, Memory Card - these are the games I excitedly foist on my friends every single time after the compo is over. Please keep submitting them, yall give me life
Will I get feedback from judges or jurors?
Not unless you ask for it. IGF used to have a system for this ages ago but it was discontinued because people kept getting into fights over the feedback (rip). If you want to hear from peeps, say so in your judging notes and include some contact info! (This year in particular I highly recommend having non-twitter contact info lol) I also sometimes go out of my way to reach out to devs whose work I loved, and I wouldn't be surprised if others do as well.
Part 2: Submission Advice
I've decided to submit - now can I make my game stand out?
Alright! So the first thing you need to know about IGF is that aggressively selling yourself is your best friend. With such a large pool of submissions, most games don't get played through all the way unless they really catch people's eye, and most judges will be playing between 10 and 50 games over the course of the month the judging phase lasts, so your best chance is to be extremely up-front about why your game is cool.
Give us the pitch and then explain your goals, what about your game stands out, etc. Don't hold back for fear of spoilers, this is not the place to do that - the judging pool is comprised of gamedevs and press and academics, we know how to get onboard for an interesting concept if we know it's there. Don't risk people falling off in a slow burn intro without knowing there's more coming afterward. If Toby Fox can post a gigantic list in the Judge Notes of all the best moments in Undertale so judges knew to look out for them - and he did - then being upfront is good enough for you, too.
Highlight your best moments
Many judges are busy professionals - assume they may not have time to get 15+ hours into your game, even if they want to. Highlight the best parts of your experience by:
- Say up-front if there's something cool within the first few hours so players know to push thru to it early
- Including debug saves or level selects that allow players to bounce to the most exciting parts can make a huge impact, esp in longer games (this also helps a lot if they get stuck due to bugs)
- Speaking of debug features, assume bugs will happen and include debug cheats if it's feasible. Nothing's more frustrating than getting stuck and having to laboriously figure out the problem - or give up entirely - during judging. If players can Unstuck themselves, skip ahead, etc, it'll help smooth the road past any major issues they encounter.
- If you really want to go the extra mile, making a special alternate awards show "route" or build that shows abbreviated highlights of the game (make it optional) can give a great impression of how your game evolves over time. I've seen this leveraged EXTREMELY effectively with puzzle games that have a lot of levels.
Check your Dang Email
I can't stress enough how important it is that the email you use to submit be one that is accessible to multiple team members and checked frequently - When IGF judges run into bugs, or run out of steam keys on your submission, or any other issue, their support requests are sent to your email address. It really sucks, but every single year there's at least one or two games that just do not run at all and no one can get ahold of the devs. Don't let it be you!!!
Part 3: The Nitty-Gritty
This section primarily contains hyperdetailed advice for during the submissions process and can probably be skipped if you're just casually reading.
Common submission pitfalls
BUILDS.
Builds are weird and magical and it's incredibly important that you get them right. A little intro:
Builds are used for two specific things:
- Distributing copies of your game
- Determining whether judges are eligible to judge your game
You want to make sure both of those happen smoothly. Let's cover both axes:
As far as distribution:
When you paste a list of game keys into the build form, that's not actually what judges see on the other side - they're given a button that pulls a single line from your list. That one line is all they get. In ideal circumstances, you want this to be a game key that's correct for their region - anything else will possibly waste keys or get you support requests. So:
- Make sure you split your builds by region on region-locked platforms - usually consoles. NA and EU keys for playstation etc should go under different builds, and they should be marked as such so people know which list to pull from.
- Obviously, you also need to split your builds by platform as well.
- DO NOT put anything that isn't a game key in the game key list. You don't want judges to click for a key and get a message like "hey let me know how things go :)" instead. This has actually happened to me.
- Be generous with keys. If your game gets popular they may go suddenly fast. That just means people are excited - facilitate that!! You do not want to be the indie dev who said - I'm not joking - "I know how IGF works and I think you've had enough", and then didn't win any awards.
As far as eligibility:
The platforms and hardware requirements you set for a game are used to determine who games are automatically, randomly assigned to during the judging phase. For this reason, you want that pool to be as large as possible.
- This probably goes without saying, but if you leave your platform field blank or N/A, NO ONE WILL GET ASSIGNED YOUR GAME. This happens a few times every year, somehow.
- Be generous with platform assignations where it makes sense. It's fine to mark your build as both Steam Deck and Steam(PC). Don't just mark your game as Steam Deck if it also runs on desktop computers, because otherwise you'll miss out on non-steam-deck owners.
- This may sound counterintuitive, but if your game fundamentally requires a perhipheral to play, mark all builds as requiring that perhipheral. The classic example of this is a VR local multiplayer game where one player is in VR and the other is on an android phone. If you mark the separate android build as NOT requiring VR, you will get a bunch of judges who don't own VR headsets assigned your game - because the system thinks "oh they can just play the android non-VR version" - and then all of them will mark it as "couldn't play". If it's fundamental, just stick it on all of them as a fundamental prerequisite.
- If you're confused about the difference between "developer" and "consumer" when picking, say, a console, just know that "developer" generally means "requires a devkit to run" and almost no judges have them. If you're unsure it's almost certainly correct to pick "consumer".
What kind of build should I submit for PC games, Steam or Standalone?
The honest answer is that it depends on the circumstances.
- Generally speaking, I think steam keys are a good idea for singleplayer games, because it lets you continue to patch the build during judging without worrying about updating things on the IGF interface.
- HOWEVER - the opposite is true for online multiplayer games. Generally speaking, if a game is online MP and isn't released yet, the only way I'm gonna easily get a group together to play it is if I can send copies to my friends.
Multiplayer
Multiplayer games are notoriously hard to organize for IGF. Online multiplayer for unreleased games is especially hard to coordinate timing for. There are ways you can ease this.
- Please list VERY UP FRONT whether your game is multiplayer and if it's local or online MP. These games have special requirements for judging and judges like to go around tagging them so people can find them. Make it as easy as possible for us to do.
- The above-mentioned downloadable builds so that I can pass copies to my friends to play together help a lot with setting up online lobbies.
- Similarly, setting up "play with the devs" times during judging (list these in the submission or in the game itself) so that individual judges can hop on with a full server goes a long way.
Anything you can do to ease putting the entire onus on judges to fill out an entire multiplayer server by themselves will help, genuinely.
Can you tell me more about the structure and timing of IGF?
Sure!
- After submissions close, IGF staff generally spends a week or two vetting builds - just to make sure they run.
- After that, generally in mid-october but sometimes later, Judging opens. Judging is the wide pool, where something like 100+ judges are sicced on the entire pool of games at random, with the goal being to have every game get a decent amount of play. Judges vote for games they like in each of the award categories. After about a month of that, ending in mid-november, the Jury phase starts.
- Jurors are groups of 5-7 people per category and are handpicked from specialists in their fields. Art jurors will generally be artists, narrative jurors writers, etc. The jury has access to the entire pool of games, but has additional tools that let them sort games by how many votes the judges gave them and the like. Jurors have a month, ending in mid-december, to generally play through the top 15 or so voted games in their category, and then anything else that interests them - I've seen stuff as low as #40 in a category get noticed and bumped up during discussions. It's a very by-hand process. At the end, the jury does a blind ranked-choice vote and that's used to determine both the nominees and the winner.
Whew. I think that's everything. If people have questions I'm happy to answer them in the comments or the reblogs or asks or, idk, anywhere. Thanks for reading!