The glorious people behind the IGF Pirate Kart are at it again and this time around, they're looking to make a splash at GDC 2012. According to the description on their Kickstarter page, Glorious Trainwrecks will be hosting a game-making session sometime late February. The games from that weekend will then later be showcased in a kiosk at the upcoming conference. As you might have already guessed, that's where the funds will come in - they need money to purchase the required space.

Regardless of whether you're capable of contributing financially or not, you can still make games for the event. There are no restrictions or requirements. You just need to create an account here and then follow the relevant instructions.

Full details about the Kickstarter Project can be found here.

(Also, Happy New Year everyone! May 2012 be awesome!)

increpare squeezes out one last game before the new year, and Microtone's perspective-shifting puzzles prove quite the challenge! Players must collect six X's in each level by moving their square and shifting the perspective of the stage to reach new areas.

Microtone is controlled entirely by mouse. Players left-click on an area the black square can reach to traverse. To rotate the perspective, players left-click on the blue background and move the mouse around.

Microtone is now available to play via browser, with options to download the Windows or Mac free versions and its source code. In case you missed increpare's last awesome commercial release, be sure to read up on and experience English Country Tune. Happy New Years!

Japan's twice-a-year, three-day hobbyist extravaganza just wrapped. Comic Market 81, taking place at the Tokyo Big Sight convention center near Kokusai Tenjijou station, saw an attendance in the hundreds of thousands this winter.

Among those participating in the year-end festivities were Cave Story creator Daisuke Amaya and the music composers of XBLIG shooter Prismatic Solid, Shinji Hosoe and Ayako Saso.

As Japan rings in the new year, photographic highlights of the creative gathering have become available to browse, via our flickr photo set.

8-bit inspired VJ Raquel Meyers, co-creator of the independently developed art game THE GREAT ADVENTURE OF WH-TVR, sends a sprite-styled holiday card by FAX.

The animation of bunnies riding roller coasters is the product of a collaboration with chip musician Goto80 for an art exhibit hosted by the Danish Arts Council. The old school season's greetings follow the release of the video artist's compilation disc "useless yet crucial" early this year.

In the latest postings over the last seven days, Gamasutra's jobs board plays host to roles in every major discipline, including opportunities at Havok, Sledgehammer Games, Frogster, and others.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across Gamasutra's network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

Airtight Games Senior Animator:
"Airtight Games is a group of industry veterans formed around the core of the team that produced the award winning, 90 ranked game Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge. We recently released a new intellectual property AAA title with Capcom called Dark Void. We are now working on several new AAA titles for a variety of markets. This is a chance to get on board a unique project with a quality focused, development and publishing team."

Sledgehammer Games / Activision: Senior Rendering Engineer:
"Sledgehammer Games, co-developers of Call of Duty MW3, is hiring! Sledgehammer Games was founded with a singular goal: Achieve Excellence. We have a state of the art facility, an industry leading development team, and a studio culture built to promote and support world class game developers. We are actively recruiting top talent for our Call of Duty development team. If you are passionate and driven to do your best work, and have a desire to work on the most successful FPS franchise in the history of video games, please apply online."

Some may say that 2011 was the year of the indie gaming boom. For me, 2011 was the year that indie games pretty much became equals with AAA releases, as the likes of Humble Indie Bundle and Steam made indie a more widely accepted culture of gaming.

What does 2012 hold then? I have a horrible sinking feeling that next year will see indie games reaching their peak, as more and more devs jump on board the indie scene, churn out a load of old cobblers, and push the stuff that actually deserves recognition into the background. I hope I'm wrong, of course, and I'm not saying that we should be limiting who is allowed to call themselves 'indie' or not either, or else we'd lose the whole point of the term! But with so much crap to sift through to find the good stuff already, the next 12 months could go either way.

Fortunately, there are already tons of great indie games on the horizon, and here I will attempt to bring 10 of them to the surface. You'll note that I've missed out some obvious ones - essentially, if a game has already featured in a previous '10 Indie Games To Watch Out For' (2010, 2011), then I've left it out here. Looking back, I was perhaps a little too optimistic regarding the release dates of certain games!

Anyway, on to the main spectacle - here are 10 titles that you will (hopefully) be playing next year.

Today's collection of independent game links includes more indie game news, interviews, and developer announcements from around the 'net. (image source)

RGCD: Zooming Secretary (NES)
"Shiru and PinWizz have somehow taken the combination of phone answering, filing and a variety of office stereotypes and lovingly moulded them in to an excellent arcade title for the NES/Famicom. Underpaid and overworked office minions of the world, Zooming Secretary is a game written for you."

IGDA: IndieSpective: The Indie Difference
"Nothing contributes more to diversity and creativity in a game than diversity and creativity in a game studio. In America, it is sometimes hard to see a great deal of diversity in the typical game studio. Partly because of the dominant Caucasian culture and partly because of the historical male population of gamers, game studios in America tend to attract white males."

Cribzero blog: Echo Space Released on Xbox 360
"Echo Space, like Super Symmetry, is a top-down space shooter that involves strategic use of a deployable drone."

Gamasutra: Antipole Coming to Europe on the Nintendo DSiWare Service
"[Saturnine Games'] Antipole is a fast paced, action packed side scrolling adventure equipping players with the power to alter the world around them by reversing gravity."

DIY Gamer: Two Minor Indie Game Bundles from Groupees
[The two bundles discussed are the Digital Arrow & Gareth Coker bundle and the Ludosity Bundle, with Bob Came in Pieces and Ittle Dew.]

Joystiq: Fez rated in Europe, the four-year wait is almost over
"Fez is finally showing signs of imminent birth, with this being the equivalent of "water breaking," as Europe's PEGI board recently classified the game for Xbox Live."

Icon Games: Our Vita Development Experiences Part One
"Steve has done such an incredible job with the Vita engine so far. It looks wonderful - finally after years of Wii & PSP development I have proper pixel shaders, normal maps, real-time shadows, bloom, reflections and other effects."

Yet another game about Zombies, Fesh is another new take on that classic set up. You're lost in a pixelated mansion, viewing the action from a top down perspective, battling against increasing numbers of the shambling undead, where one hit can result in your untimely death.

It's nothing earth-shattering, but the atmosphere is effectively built with the sombre music interspersed with snippets of news reports detailing the Zombie outbreak.

It's free, and you can grab it yourself from right here.

Sick Kreations, developer of the top-rated Xbox Live Indie first-person shooter Nuclear Wasteland, has released its ambitious online multiplayer follow-up End of Days: Infected vs. Mercs.

End of Days is an arena-styled FPS that features a variety of solo and team-based deathmatch modes, including a unique Head Fest variant in which "only head shots count and your head is twice its size." Notably, the game supports up sixteen simultaneous players over Xbox Live -- an impressive feat for an underrepresented genre in the XBLIG catalog.

End of Days is available for 240 Microsoft points ($3).

Zander Milroy and Tim Dresser of Monosynth Games have crafted a clever puzzler in Coins, made recently playable via Kongregate after being on the Blackberry, Android, and iTunes market for several months.

The basic tenet is to place coins in the outlined area in a set number of moves. At first, a coin can only be moved to a place where it touches two other coins. Upon reaching the third set of levels, another colored coin is introduced with another rule: a coin can only move to a spot where it touches coins of each color.

Coin's puzzles increase in difficulty gradually. While they may be solved on the first few tries, finding the fewest moves will probably prove a more challenging task. The paid mobile versions are said to offer 20 more levels.

The browser based version of Coins provided a pleasantly and engagingly frustrating hour or so of puzzle solving that deviated far from the typical match-three formula. The presentation is kept visually simple and aurally ambient.

Those hesitant to purchase can sample Monosynth's Coins on Kongregate first. The full game can be purchased for $0.99 for Blackberry, Android, and iOS.