Organizers for the third annual Sense of Wonder Night, a Tokyo Game Show event spotlighting innovative game concepts, put out a call to developers for submissions and revealed two additions for this year's fair: a smartphone category and an SOWN Pavilion.
Modeled after GDC's Experimental Gameplay Workshop, SOWN selects a group of indie developers from around the world to demonstrate and explain their unique video games and prototypes to a Tokyo Game Show audience for 10 minutes, with Japanese-English and English-Japanese translation. Game designers interested in participating in this year's around have until July 11th so submit their project.
To accommodate the growing popularity of indie titles developed for mobile platforms like iPhone, iPad, Android, and Windows Phone, organizers added a new category focused on smartphone games.
Also new this year is a SOWN Pavilion set up on the Tokyo Game Show expo floor during TGS's business days, where developers can present their games to other industry attendees, exchanging and sharing opinions/ideas for future projects.
Gamasutra sister site GameSetWatch posted a
comprehensive write-up of last year's SOWN, which featured titles like
Echocrome creator Jun Fujiki's
Incompatible Block, Enemy Airship's
Shadow Physics, and many other experimental titles. You can
watch the full set of presentation videos for SOWN 2009's games on YouTube.
The jury for this year's Sense Of Wonder Night, which takes place on the evening of September 17th, includes
Katamari Damacy and
Noby Noby Boy creator Keita Takahashi, Enterbrain's 'Maker' series director Kenji Sugiuchi, Gamasutra publisher/IGF Chairman Simon Carless, noted 'dojin' game creator Kenta Cho, Vector Inc.'s Takashi Katayama, IGDA Japan coordinator Kiyoshi Shin, and new juror, Zenner Works (
Okage: Shadow King) CTO Onitama.
The creators of the selected games will receive free Tokyo Game Show 2010 Business Day entry passes (the major Japanese video game show's business-only days are September 16th-175th, with public days on September 18th-19th). You can find more information on the event and how you can submit your game at the
English-language Sense Of Wonder Night web page.
