The indie dev community appears split over Kongregate's new contest which attaches a monetary prize to this weekend's Ludum Dare 48- and 72-hour competitions. Kongregate's prizes total $2,400 for the three games which are the highest voted on their service. From the judging rules, they are "100% popularity based on the average five-star user rating on Kongregate.com as of 11:59:59 p.m. PT on September 28, 2012."

Ludum Dare organizer Mike Kasprzak clarified that the two events should be seen as separate. "It's not sponsorship. We aren't getting a dime."

Organizer Phil Hassey said Kongregate approached them a while back. Hassey responded, "We would be totally cool with you creating a post on LudumDare.com telling the Flash devs that 'Hey, put your Ludum Dare game on Kongregate, and we'll do a community competition' or whatever. While we don't offer prizes as part of Ludum Dare, we have no problem with encouraging people to seek out prizes as part of separate but related competitions."

Hassey explained that organizers have encouraged entrants to take their games to the next level. Several of them have gone on to win prizes in the IGF and other competitions.

Ludum Dare's rules have not changed this competition, but the Kongregate contest asks submissions to conform to stricter standards. Users must integrate Kongregate Statistics API and heed a laundry list of restrictions.

Leo Christopherson must have been a great math teacher, we'll probably never really know, but we will always be certain of the fact that he was an excellent TRS-80 programmer and game designer that wowed computer gamers back in the late 70s and early-to-mid 80s. He was also very close to the archetype of what we'd today describe as an indie developer, what with him being a one man team with unique and quirky ideas, who still fondly remembers "the successes I had with graphics and sound on the old TRS-80 as being some of the best moments of my life. I would hope programmers today can experience that too, but I'm not sure how things go in the large teams of experts these days where each person is involved with one small aspect of the final result".

Leo came up with such classic games as Dancing Demon, Android NIM and Voyage of Valkyrie that are still remembered, loved and played to this day. "You know, it's really humbling that I still get emails from folks that were just kids back when I was programming on the TRS-80's" he told Jim McGinley who interviewed him and provided the quotes for this article. "They all say how much they enjoyed the programs, and I'm really pleased at how many mention that their careers in the computer field were inspired by my little programs".

The Independent Games Festival China - which will take place alongside this November's GDC China in Shanghai - has opened its call for submissions and is accepting indie game entries from the pan-Pacific area from now through September 10.

Following its success from previous years, GDC China will once again host all three main elements of IGF China, including the IGF Summit, the IGF Pavilion, and the prestigious IGF Awards.

Now in its fourth year, the IGF Summit at GDC China will feature sessions from some of the world's top developers, while the IGF Pavilion will showcase some of the region's best independent and student games.

And of course the IGF Awards - which are split into both Main and Student competitions - will honor the many talented developers in the pan-Pacific area.

Gaijin Games' Bit.Trip Beat

Nintendo is typically the butt of the joke when it comes to digital storefronts and sales. Developers have routinely lambasted the company's services -- WiiWare, in particular, and DSiWare -- over the past couple of years.

Trent Oster, co-founder of Beamdog Studios, which ported MDK 2 to WiiWare, told Gamasutra earlier this year that Wii (and WiiWare) "isn't a good platform for developers." He also cited problems with how Nintendo handles payments, file size limitations and game certification.

Icon Games released numerous titles for WiiWare -- such as Stunt Cars, Family Games and Soccer Bashi -- and had even harsher words for the digital platform.

"... The WiiWare store is horribly inflexible; so if a title isn't selling you have no options to boost sales," head of development Richard Hill-Whittall wrote on the company's blog. "You can't change the price point, they don't run sales or promotions, you can't update the game once it is on sale unless there is a critical bug found, etc."

Simon Flesser and Magnus Gardeback of mobile game studio Simogo urged developers at GDC Europe today to "base [design and business] decisions on what feels right instead of what is considered right."

With the studio's first game, 2010's Kosmo Spin for iOS, the two-man team created the game following all the rules you're "meant" to follow -- 99 cent price, small file size, lots of updates and a very casual setting. These are the elements they had read would make their game sell.

Simogo's second game Bumpy Road also attempted to incorporate a number of these "popular" mobile game elements, with lots of updates released post-launch and cut-price sales from time to time. However, the game was priced higher than 99 cents, and yet still managed to sell solidly, making the development pair question whether there really was a set way to sell mobile games.

Earlier this year, Beat Sneak Bandit was released -- a rather niche rhythm game that was "deliberately difficult" and required that the player had a lot of patience.

It broke every mobile game rule, says Flesser and Gardeback, providing players with hardcore gameplay that featured no in-app purchases, no cross-promotion, no ads, and no cut-price sales at all.

There are some times when you run into things you didn't even know existed and then go on and wonder how anyone could live without them. It's those times when you either feel consumerism has finally gotten to you or you are a designer of complex games and discover such tools as articy:draft.

As I sincerely hope you are a designer and not someone who's ready to spend quite a lot of money on the "first professional tool for story and game design", let me just say that articy:draft is a truly impressive program. Or, well, at the very least and after putting marketing jargon aside, the very first tool of its ilk I have ever ran into, and I'm utterly loving it.

Shaw-Han Liem, Jonathan Mak and Jason Degroot "6955" at the E3 Expo

Queasy Games' Sound Shapes for PlayStation 3 and PS Vita is a sidescrolling platformer, where level design generates sound design. The game allows you to customize your own stages in its level editor, incorporating building blocks designed by guest artists like Beck and deadmau5, and share those results over the PlayStation Network.

Queasy's Jonthan Mak won three Independent Games Festival awards for his solo effort Everyday Shooter, a marker of its inventive unity of gameplay, graphics and sound. This time around, audio has been overseen by Shaw-Han Liem, the composer of the I Am Robot and Proud series of electronic music albums.

In reaching out to visual artists like indie dev team Pixeljam to craft sprites for the game, Toronto chip musician Jason DeGroot, aka "6955," has been tasked with coordinating creative collaborations over the course of development. In this interview we hear about the prototyping process that preceded the recent launch of Sound Shapes.

In interviews you have said that Everyday Shooter got its start after you decided to turn your attention away from a more elaborate project to try out something simpler in design. Sound Shapes, it's been mentioned, got its start five years ago in a basement. What objectives were guiding you at the beginning?

Jonathan Mak: This is kind of the exact opposite. It started off with Shaw-Han and I creating visualizers for live music shows. We started talking about doing a game, but the problem was that at that point I still had Everyday Shooter stuck in my head.

Shaw-Han Liem: We grew up like a block away from each other but never met until around six years ago. I had been getting into projections and processing, and since he has so much experience doing coded visuals, it made sense to talk.

In a rather novel pay-once, cross-platform experiment, Galcon developer Phil Hassey has offered a limited deal to give iOS purchasers of Dynamite Jack free Humble Store codes for PC.

The App Store's fierce restrictions on game codes limits this experiment such that consumers must pay for the iOS version first to get the Windows, Mac, and Linux versions free. Whereas Humble Store and Steam developers can get virtually unlimited codes for their games to distribute, Apple only gives 50 free codes per update.

To make this sale reciprocal for PC, Hassey would have had to buy the codes himself, so Apple could keep its 30% profit. Prepping for this promotion with 10,000 iOS codes would have cost him around $9,000 instead of $0.

Despite not being able to reciprocate this sale to PC owners, Hassey said he has received no complaints or backlash so far. "I reassure them that they can give their extra desktop code to a friend, so they still get benefit from this promotion."

Indie games Symphony, Rigonauts, Deponia, and Unmechanical have all hit Steam and other online stores over the past few days, offering players a healthy variety of genres for the upcoming weekend. English Country Tune is in a slightly different boat, finally releasing on Steam today after being available through the Humble store since November 2011.

Each of the games is highlighted after the jump.

This month's Ask IndieGames explores the genres and games we want to see indie developers tackle. Our blog is full of great platformers and twin-stick shooters, so we wonder what other genres merit exploration within the indie space.

Mike Rose: I really enjoyed the recent 7DFPS challenge, and the great angles that some of the participants went for. The FPS genre is pretty weird in that it barely ever goes anywhere new, with the same ideas used over and over again, yet it's been going on for so long now that we've just stopped caring whether we're playing the very same games over and over again. We should definitely be looking to push the genre forward and explore new angles with it, and I think indie devs are in the best position to experiment with it.

Other than that, I'd love to see more sport or management games from indie devs. These are two genres that I'm not even that interested in to be perfectly honest, but I think there is a huge amount of scope for expansion on concepts and innovation. The Kairosoft games, for example, are utterly fantastic management titles that have brought a lot of people into a genre they perhaps wouldn't normally touch. We need more like that. New Star Soccer is also a great management/sports game, so simple yet so addictive. More of that kind of thing would be perfectly fine with me.