Bit Blot's Aquaria , took home the top honors at the 2007 Independent Games Festival Award, nabbing the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game. The surreal art style of this 2D underwater adventure game certainly helped Bit Bot take the top award. The winners were announced tonight at the 9th Annual IGF Awards ceremony, hosted by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

Other major winners included Queasy Games' abstract shoot-em-up, Everyday Shooter , which won awards for Design Innovation and Excellence In Audio, the upcoming Xbox 360 Live Arcade title Castle Crashers , which won for Excellence In Visual Art, Three Rings' online title Bang! Howdy , which came out on top in the Technical Excellence category, and stylish Flash-based point-and-click puzzle adventure Samorost 2 , which won in the Best Web Game category.

There were two other notable Main Competition awards given out on the night -- the Audience Award, chosen by GameSpot readers, was won by The Behemoth's Castle Crashers, and IGF Platinum Sponsor GameTap gave out $20,000 in advances for indie games to appear on its PC subscription download service, as part of its special GameTap Indie Award - with Everyday Shooter getting a $10,000 advance and $5,000 advances going to Cryptic Sea's Blast Miner and Naked Sky Entertainment's RoboBlitz .

The IGF Student Showcase selected ten student-designed games and awarded a $2,500 Best Student Game prize. The award went to DigiPen Institute of Technology's capture the flag game, Toblo .

The IGF Mod Competition gave out a $5,000 award for Best Mod Game to Cut Corner Company Productions for Weekday Warrior , a corporate office adventure mod for Half-Life 2, which was also selected as the Best Singleplayer FPS Mod. Congratulations to all of this year's winners. Learn more about these and other games that competed this year by visiting www.igf.com .