[Fridays on Venus Patrol are developer Andrea ‘Bandreus‘ Portale’s day to present TIGSource DevLog Magazine, a visual guide to the newest & most interesting in-development games making the rounds on the invaluable TIGSource forums. Looking for inspiration, or just the very first look at the amazing games we’ll be talking about in the future? Click any image to learn more, and come back on Fridays for the latest picks!]

This is it! GDC’s final day, marking the end of one of the craziest weeks ever. What an amazing year for indie games this has been: today we’re proud to celebrate the 16th Annual IGF awards, showcasing this edition’s victors in a special issue, of course along the usual goodness straight from the TIGSource forums.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of days, you’re most likely already aware Lucas Pope’s dystopian document thriller Papers, Please swept the IGF, winning the prestigious Seumas McNally Grand Prize as Best Independent Game, on top of being awarded for Excellence in Narrative and Excellence in Design.

Papers, Please has a special place in TIGSource members’ hearts, as the game’s development process was recorded in a terrific devlog on our very own forums. GLORY TO ARSTOTZKA!

Other prizes where awarded to Jason Robert’s Gorogoa (Excellence in Visual Arts), Tale of Tales’ Luxuria Superbia (Nuovo award), Simogo’s DEVICE 6 (Excellence in Audio), Hoppo Games’ Risk of Rain (Best Student Game) and Galactic Cafe’s The Stanley Parable (Audience award). Congratulations to this year’s winners, and thanks for bringing honour to independent games as a whole by striving for perfection and pushing the limit ever forward!

Huzzah! So much goodness. But don’t let GDC and the IGF Awards grab all of your attention, as amazing indie games are constantly being worked on, even during this frantic week. Among the latest arrivals on the TIGS boards, we find Midora (a modern take on the 2D ARPG genre, inspired by classics like The Legend of Zelda and the Mana series), Party Animals (a political strategy game about winning the mayoral elections and also about the kind of sacrifices you’re ready to make in order to do so, featuring visuals by Prison Architect‘s artist Ryan Sumo), accompanied by Hex Brothers and Upside-Down Dimensions, two brand new projects of which only little is known about yet, but I’m very confident will soon be making the news.

I’d also like to give a special mention to Evan Todd’s Lemma and Steamburger Studio’s Let’s Go Camping!. The former is an innovative parkour game, in which every player’s move has the potential to alter the dynamic environments, while the latter is, in its creators’ words, “an FPS roguelike(lite) dungeon crawler” in which the player needs to hike, camp, and survive in a vast overworld wilderness in order to find procedurally generated dungeons and the treasures hidden within.

That’s all for now folks! Remember to check each and every devlog in the release, as all of these projects are well worth your attention. Happy final GDC hours and see you next Friday!