Google is all geared up for its first ever indie game festival which is less than a month away now. Scheduled for 24 September in San Francisco, the festival is aimed at celebrating the games developed by indie developers on Android. The company is now taking sign-ups from people who want to attend the festival.
Admission into the event is free for everyone and the attendees will get to try all the games, even the yet unreleased titles. The fans will also get to vote for their favourite game with prizes like Google Cloud credits, NVIDIA SHIELD Android TVs and K1 tablets, Razer Forge TV bundles, tickets to their annual developer conference, Google I/O and much more on the line.
Google has revealed that from around 200 games submitted by indie developers, 30 were chosen to be showcased at the event, out of which 20 are already live on the Play Store. The votes of the fans would be taken into consideration and the list would be narrowed down to 15, who will then present their projects in front of the judges and the audience in order to win prizes.
The admissions were open to indie developers from Canada and the USA, who have a team of 15 people or less. The list of judges includes personalities from Google Play and the broader gaming industry. Here is the list of judges:
- Indie Fund, co-founder and World of Goo, co-creator, Ron Carmel
- Google Play, business development manager, Hyunse Chang
- Nix Hydra, co-founder and CEO, Lina Chen
- Spry Fox, CEO, David Edery
- Google Play Indies, partner manager, Maria Essig
- Google, chief game designer, Noah Falstein
- Funplus, chief strategy officer, Dan Fiden
- Kongregate, CEO, Emily Greer
- Google Daydream and Project Tango, program manager, Alex Lee
- Gamer and independent YouTuber “CaptainSparklez”, Jordan Maron
The list of games that have already been released over Play Store and have been selected for the event include Worthing and Moncrieff’s A Matter of Murder, High Score Hero’s Hovercraft: Takedown and Chetan Surpur’s Orbit. The list of yet-to-be-released games include Bactrian Games’ Norman’s Night In: The Cave, Necrosoft Games’ Gunhouse, iNK Stories’ 1979 Revolution: Black Friday and many more. You can check the full list on Google’s official space.