The Independent Games Festival (IGF) opened submissions for the 2014 Independent Games Festival, taking place at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The deadline for the Main awards is October 19th, while the Student Showcase is October 31st. Finalists will be announced in January 2014. From there, finalist games will make their way to San Francisco to show off the latest builds at the IGF Pavilion on the Game Developers Conference 2014 ExpoFloor, to compete for nearly $60,000 in prizes.

Developer Czarcade was the big winner at the first annual North American Indie Prize Showcase which took place this week at the Casual Connect Conference in San Francisco. Czarcade's mobile game Clobbr took the top prize, being named Best in Show. Other big winners were East Side Games' Dargon Up for mobile devices, ClickShake Games' The Ballads of Reemus, Barking Mouse Studio's Lost Toys, and Muse Games' Icarus Online.

E. Zachary Knight pointed out a new Kickstarter funding campaign for a game called A Wasted Life.  Developed by fellow Oklahoma developer Robert Dishong, A Wasted Life is a zombie survival game promising procedural weapons, randomly generated environments to explore, and a "dynamic" story system.

Peter Molyneux is one of several high profile game developers that will serve as a judge at the 2013 Indie Speed Run, a 48-hour game jam taking place during the month of September. Peter Molyneux is in good company - he'll be joined by Markus "Notch" Persson, Suda51, Ron Gilbert and a whole bunch of other creative types to help pick the winners.

Polytron producer Marie-Christine Bourdua said that she was pretty surprised to hear that Fez 2 had been cancelled. Speaking to Joystiq at the Torontaru July (a monthly meet-up for game players and developers in Toronto, Canada), Bourdua said that she wasn't at the home office in Montreal when Fish made his very public announcement about cancelling Fez 2.

While the editorial pages at many gaming websites are featuring opinion pieces on how the Internet is a pretty nasty place for creative types, not everyone agrees. Of course all this soul searching and hand ringing is related to Polytron's Phil Fish saying over the weekend that he has cancelled further development on Fez 2 and has quit the games industry after a public dust-up with Marcus Beer (also known as Annoyed Gamer over at GameTrailers).

On this week's show (Episode 62) hosts Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight talk about the very public meltdown and rage-quit of Fez developer Phil Fish, Nintendo's decision to remove content from the next Super Smash Bros. game because of the Internet, Australia's hypocrisy when it comes to game ratings and drugs; and the results of last week's poll on Game Politics. Download Episode 62 now: SuperPAC Episode 62 (1 hour, 1 minute) 56.5 MB.

Even though Guncraft was released earlier this month on the PC for $15, developer Exato knows that getting it on Steam is important for driving sales. The company revealed today that the game will debut on Steam August 9 and is asking fans to help it design Steam Trading cards specific to the platform.

Runic Games announced that its popular role-playing game for the PC, Torchlight II, is well, pretty popular. Since its launch the game has sold over two million copies. Given that the game was highlighted prominently in the recent Steam Summer Getaway Sale, this announcement is not surprising, though clearly all of those copies did not sell for the full regular price. The game was released in September of 2012.

While many are still parsing last night's announcement that every Xbox One console can basically be used as a debug unit to create and test Xbox One games - including many who want to wait and hear more when Microsoft talks about it at the upcoming Gamescom event - Microsoft is pushing another angle: how youngsters can use it to create games too.

Update: Microsoft has confirmed that "every Xbox One" can be used to make games, meaning that every unit can in fact be turned into a development kit, or debug unit. Kotaku offers this statement from Microsoft on the matter:

Valve Software has "greenlit" 14 more games and two pieces of software today for eventual release on Steam. That brings the total number of Greenlit titles to 127 to-date.

The 2013 Boston Festival of Indie Games announced that it will present a night of video game and chiptune music from some of the world's most exciting performers in Boston, Ma. The one-day event, Boston Plays Indies, is being sponsored by music game developer Harmonix and BostonFIG.

Oddworld Inhabitants founder Lorne Lanning says that Microsoft's Xbox One approach to indies ignores the little guys. Lanning's studio is responsible for the popular Oddworld series of games including Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee, Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath, and more.

According to an MCV report, even the most recognizable and popular titles on the Android-based $99 Ouya platform have yet to make more than $50,000 on their games.

Kalypso Media USA has confirmed with GamePolitics that Haemimont Games has received a letter from the law firm representing Treehouse Avatar Technologies. Haemimont Studios received a letter on July 1 related to its Prohibition-era mob-themed action strategy game Omerta - City of Gangsters and how "it could be" violating Treehouse's 858 patent (U.S Patent 8,180,858), "Methods for Presenting Data Over a Network Based Network User Choices and Collecting Real-time Data Related to Said Choices."

Last Limb let us know that a Kickstarter campaign for its physics puzzle game Organic Panic is underway and has raised $7,000 of its $40,000 goal. The game, which has been in development for five years, is the brainchild of Brooklyn-based studio Last Limb.

Ouya, the makers of the Android-based home gaming console of the same name that was released last month, hopes to influence game development on the platform with big wads of cash. OUYA today announced the $1 million Free The Games Fund, which promises to match the funding amount received by developers who fund their games via Kickstarter.

It's bad enough to steal someone else's work wholesale, but it is beyond the pale to defend such action by saying "we couldn't reach the original developers to present it with a deal." In April of this year Taiwanese developer Rocky Hong released the puzzle game Magnetized on GameStop's Kongregate. The game proved to be very popular with the Kongregate community who downloaded it an impressive 280,000 times.

The Humble Bundle Weekly Sale featuring 15 games from indie RPG developer Spiderweb Software's catalog (DRM-free) has managed to raise over $100,000 in a little over 24 hours.

The developers of the indie action RPG game Cube World have been trying to sell early alpha access to the game for a little under a weak but fans who try to purchase the game keep getting an error and can't complete the purchase. At first developers thought the problem was that too many visitors were trying to buy the cute little voxel-based RPG at the same time.

It turns out that the problem is that someone has been consistently bombarding the servers with an intentional distributed denial of service attack.

Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty! won't come out on Xbox 360 or Xbox One according to Oddworld Inhabitants boss Lorne Lanning. Lanning used to be a big fan of the Xbox platform - back in 2001 he helped launch the first Xbox with the exclusive Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee - but Microsoft's new policies rub him the wrong way. Oddworld: New 'n' Tasty! will be coming to PlayStation 3, PS Vita, PlayStation 4, Wii U, PC, Mac and Linux.

Microsoft says that indies will continue to be an important part of the Xbox ecosystem when it launches Xbox One later this year. The company has had a difficult time with its messaging following its Xbox One press event last week, and while it has blamed the media for a fair share of the confusion around various issues, it's clear that comments from various executives in the company is the root of most of the confusion.

Even as Microsoft revealed that it would ditch the Xbox Live Arcade designation for games in the new version of Xbox Live - likely to be launched with the release of Xbox One later this year, the company also revealed that it would not let indie game developers self-publish their games. This makes sense considering that it ditched support for its entire XNA program last year.

Michael Newman and his Los Angeles-based interactive development and product design company Pomp Productions has created an interesting game called Video Game Sans Video. Recently shown off at the 2013 Maker Faire, and highlighted by Discovery, Video Game Sans Video is a clever contraption that lets players navigate a space ship in four directions (up, down, forward and back).

As detailed in this May 7 story, indie studio Notion Games indicated that Ubisoft had asked it to change the name of its game Super Ubi Land to something else to avoid the implication that the game was somehow associated with the French publisher. At the time Notion Games said that it would do just that and that it understood where Ubisoft was coming from.

German online game developer InnoGames will host a Game Jam in its Hamburg office on June 21. Participants will be charged with developing computer games with a team in a 48-hour period. Teams will have to create graphics, game design and programming from scratch. This is the sixth game jam held by the company. A team from InnoGames will also be participating in the event.

Organizers of The Boston Festival of Indie Games announced that game designer and producer Robin Hunicke will deliver the keynote address at this year's event to take place Saturday, September 14, 2013 at the Stratton Student Center and the Johnson Athletic Center on the MIT campus.

Believe it or not, the (mostly) clean-shaven gentleman in the video to your left is Double Fine's Tim Schafer.  Uncle Tim comes to us today to promote Humble Bundle's new Humble Bundle.

Why would he do that?

Because Humble Bundle's new Humble Bundle is chockful of Double Fine goodness that has been bundled together most humbly.  And he wants you to buy them!

Three former Nippon Ichi Software (NIS) America employees have struck out on their own to create a new independent and digital content publishing company located in Los Angeles called Acttil. The name is an acronym for "acceptance +creativity +teamwork +trust +innovation +love." The studio features the talents of long-time and now former NIS America employees Jack Niida, Hiroko Kanazashi, and Nao Miyazawa.