The news is out: the IndieCade 2011 jurors made their choices from a list of over 400 hopefuls and have put together a knock-out lineup of finalists for the festival this year, and Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure made the grade!

I’ll be flying out to the event in Culver City California next month to bring sunshine, love, and high-pitched screaming to a state famous for its short days and dreary cloud cover. While there, i’ll be able to try out some of the year’s most talked-about indie titles, and i’ll get to hang out with an absolutely stellar group of independent game developers, many of whom i’ll likely have regrettable and unfortunate sex with. i’m creeping all their Facebook photos right now, trying to weed out the ugly ones.

Also in the running are Toronto’s Capy/SuperBrothers with Sword & Sworcery, who developed the game directly across the hall from the Untold offices under our meddling eye. And you may not yet have heard of BigPants or their selected stereoscopic game The Depths to Which I Sink, but that’s another Toronto game by none other than Jim and emilie McGinley, co-founders of the weekend-long TOJam event where Cassie and i developed Ponycorns. Finally, Gamercamp co-founder Jaime Woo had his “real” game Gargoyles selected to be part of the expo.

And it won’t just be Toronto finalists attending – there’s a whole gaggle of us from the TDot flying out, including Mathew Kumar, the indie journalist behind EXP, Shawn McGrath, who’s currently building the trippy PS3 game Dyad, and indie dev Michael Todd, who gets a front row seat to my orgiastic debauchery because we’re splitting a hotel room. This just further solidifies Toronto’s reputation as the hub of indie game development in North America, and perhaps the world.

While i’d love to bring Cassie to the event, one of the drawbacks to being an indie is that you’re constantly down at the blood bank trying to sap enough haemoglobin to make rent. i could get her a plane ticket, but then of course i wouldn’t be able to act up at IndieCade, so i’d have to bring her mom … and if i brought Cheryl, i’d have to buy a ticket for Cassie’s little sister … and if you’ve ever seen our family pack for a 2-day stay at Grandma’s, you’d know that we couldn’t stop there – we’d have to charter our own cargo plane to transport all the “necessities” that two little girls require so that the day doesn’t devolve into a competition to see who can shriek the loudest. In short, i don’t have the means.

Ask Me About Loom™

While i’ll be happy to talk Ponycorns and its upcoming Japanese translation, i feel the game has about as much press and attention as any indie title will ever get. As IndieCade fast approaches, we’re working hard on playable demos of our upcoming games, Putty Crime: On the Trail of the Foxy Badger, a puzzle game modeled entirely in clay, and Spellirium, a post-apocalyptic word puzzle adventure game.

See you at IndieCade!

Ryan Henson Creighton is a Toronto-based game developer, and founder of Untold Entertainment Inc., specializing in online games for kids, teens, tweens and preschoolers.

Ryan Henson Creighton

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