What would the world be without some good old fashioned deadlines? Soothingly calm? A lot less stressful? At first that may be the case, but you won’t be anywhere near your happy place when projects come tumbling down like some hippie avalanche. We may not always like them, but deadlines keep spinning the world around.

And boy, does February have A LOT of deadlines for you! Here’s a quick look at the more interesting funding, event, and award deadlines to look out for in the coming weeks and months.

Funding

• February 12 – Creative Europe Media: We know we’ve badgered you with this one for quite some time, but we would really love some more Belgian teams to take advantage of this European grant.
• June 23 – VAF/Gamefonds call: The first call deadline of the year has already zipped by, so you still have a couple of months to prepare a kick-ass submission.

Awards

• February 14 – Ludicious Awards: Ludicious looks to honour innovative games that explore novel ideas. They also have a student category. Winners get a money prize, and nominees are invited to exhibit during the festival, taking place in Zurich from July 1-3.
• February 17 – The Label 2020 Indie Showdown: If you have an unreleased and unsigned mobile game, you can get it judged by a star indie jury featuring Tim Garbos and Kelly Wallick. The winner walks away with $ 10,000.
• March 3 – The Big Indie Pitch: Follow in the footsteps of Happy Volcano and Studio Waterzooi and pitch your mobile or VR/AR game before a varied audience. If you’re working on a very big game, you might want to look into The Very Big Indie Pitch in Seattle.

• March 10 – Reboot/Develop Blue Indie Awards: This Dubrovnik based event is steadily becoming one of our biggest industry events in Europe, so don’t miss your chance to showcase your game there.
• March 2020 – INDIGO awards: The biggest industry event of the Netherlands takes place on June 26 in Utrecht and you’ll get the chance to showcase your game and win an award. Registrations open in March 2020.
• April 1 – IG Educational Game Award: These awards are focused on games for educational and social organisations, and supporting families, children and learning, but any game can enter the competition and will be reviewed by the jury. Just don’t expect your FPS to make the cut.

Events

• February 15 – IndieCade @ E3: The best way for an indie to get into E3 without signing a deal with Microsoft. Later on you’ll also get to sign up for IndieCade USA and Europe, taking place in LA and Paris respectively.
• February 15 – Serious Play Conference speaker call: The Serious Play Conference is the biggest industry event on serious games. To quote Sinatra, if you can speak there, you can speak anywhere. About serious games, that is.
• April 27-28 – White Nights CEO Summit Barcelona: A bit different from your usual game event, but we think even our smaller studio owners can benefit from networking with C-level executives from around the world.

All deadlines (and many more events) are courtesy of our wonderful event calendar, that you really should start using if you aren’t already. It will allow for some clarity in your head. You know what that means: more room for some of those tasty deadlines.