In its fourth year, the Independent Game Summit continued to grow both in attendance -- frequently playing to at-capacity crowds in a room seating 1,000 -- and in ideas, as more developers turn away from traditional publishing routes to strike out on their own, and convene to share their own best practices in marketing, funding, hyper-local community building and artistic inspiration.

Again, 2D Boy's Ron Carmel took to the stage to detail how the new Indie Fund -- a co-op initiative in which some of indie games' biggest successes have banded together to help seed and finance new and promising talent -- would operate, with visual aids telling the Indie Fund story by Braid artist David Hellman. A write-up and full gallery of the talk is available via Boing Boing.

Later, Hello Games' Sean Murray (Joe Danger) would explain how his new studio of AAA-vets had to 'MacGyver things together' as they individually took on more responsibility in their new lives as indies, thatgamecompany's Kellee Santiago and Robin Hunicke (flOwer) explained the crucial -- and stressful -- importance of extended exploratory and prototyping phases, and Tiger Style's Randy Smith looked more deeply at a number of recent indie successes like Captain Forever, Spelunky and his own Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor to help explain why his personal mantra of "immediacy with depth" can be a useful tactic for future game designers.

Finally, this year's Indie Gamemaker Rant returned and proved one of the most popular sessions of the IGS, covering topics as far and wide as workplace diversity, Apple's iPhone App Store and press coverage of independent games, from speakers including Capy Games' Nathan Vella (Critter Crunch, Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes), Team Meat's Tommy Refenes (Super Meat Boy), designer Anna Anthropy (Redder), Papermint designer Babsi Lippe, Area 5 producer Ryan O'Donnell, newly-appointed IGF chairman Brandon Boyer, Superbrothers' Craig Adams (Sword & Sworcery EP) and many more. Adams' rant has been adapted as a feature for Boing Boing, while full video and slides from the event can be viewed for free via the GDC Vault.

For the third year in a row, the Independent Games Summit took an up-close, intimate look at the indie scene, surveying the past, evaluating the present and projecting the future from both creative and business perspectives.

The 2009 Independent Game Summit took place on March 23 and 24 in San Francisco as part of the Game Developers Conference. As distribution methods and business models for independently developed games continue to evolve, that amount of freedom and flexibility means that indie developers are running into new challenges, many of which notable lecturers addressed during the summit

For instance, there was Ron Carmel with World of Goo developer 2D Boy, who went into detail about the financials behind creating the game and launching a company. Petri Purho, Independent Games Festival Grand Prize Winner and Crayon Physics Deluxe creator talked about prototyping as a way to "get the bad game ideas out of your system."

Hothead's Vlad Ceraldi and Joel DeYoung were also there, shared their experiences with the creation of Penny Arcade Adventures and the currently-in-production Deathspank. Brad Wardell, CEO of Galactic Civilizations developer Stardock was also on hand to explain the opportunities indies have with core gamers.

Other sessions included an iPhone discussion with Adam Atomic Saltsman (Semi Secret Software - Wurdle) and Sergei Gourski (Subatomic Studios - Fieldrunners); an indie-focused presentation from the eyes of big-time corporate (yet indie-friendly) developer Rod Humble, EVP of EA Play; and an indie developer rant that covered everything from sex education "games" to ethical game design.

In its second iteration, the 2008 Independent Games Summit at GDC looked to highlight the brightest and the best of indie development, with discussions ranging from indie game distribution methods through game design topics, detailed postmortems of independent titles, digital distribution-centric business concepts, and much more.

The event took place on the Monday and Tuesday of Game Developers Conference 2008, February 18th and 19th, and the full lecture/panel roster is available for reading. Featured lectures included N+ co-creator Raigan Burns on rolling your own tech, Q Games' Dylan Cuthbert on creating the PixelJunk series (including the first public unveiling of PixelJunk Eden), and Introversion's Vicky Arundel (Darwinia) on indie marketing.

Also notable was Torpex's Bill Dugan on the making of XBLA title Schizoid, a postmortem of the IGF Grand Prize-winning Aquaria from Bit Blot's Derek Yu and Alec Holowka, a panel on web browser-based games, and contributions from the creators of Professor Fizzwizzle, Outpost Kaloki, Shantae and more.

Extensive coverage of this Summit appeared on sister site Gamasutra, including, from day one, the opening panel, the Aquaria postmortem, Raigan from N+'s 'unique knobs' talk, the Flash games panel, and the PixelJunk Eden discussion.

Also covered from day two was the 'Two Kyles' lecture on paths to indie greatness, plus the full postmortem of N+ for XBLA, and Croal and Totilo with a media perspective on indie, and the final 'State Of Indie' panel.

Featuring lectures, postmortems and roundtables from some of the most notable independent game creators around, the inaugural Independent Games Summit took place at Game Developers Conference 2007 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, on March 5th and 6th, 2007.

The full roster for the 2007 Independent Games Summit is available to read, and included notable lectures from Braid's Jonathan Blow (pictured), ThatGameCompany's Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago (Flow/Flower), and a talk on going from Narbacular Drop to Portal by Valve's Kim Swift.

[If you'd like to discuss any elements of the Independent Games Summit, including lecture suggestions, media interviews, and other feedback, please contact us at chairman@igf.com.]