If you’ve been living under a rock (okay, how about “if you haven’t been trawling the FGL forums”, which isn’t quite the same thing), you may not have heard about the 2010 FGL Games Awards. This is an idea developers created and promoted, and is very much in the spirit of “for developers, by developers.” We’re happy to help with the vote tallying, but all the nominations have come from developers. Even the ad we’re running on our website was created by our own jjwallace.

The winners of this contest will get cool medals attached to their account profile (also created by jjwallace, and they are badass), along with some goodies that we  put together. But the biggest win? Having other developers tell you that your game is the best. It’s a pretty great feeling. Please help out by voting on the nominees! Anyone with an FGL account can vote.

If you’ve visited the chat room recently you may have noticed a new icon-voting widget. Icon voting is back! If you have time, visit the chat room and vote on some icons! (Or, if you prefer, vote directly from the full-size voting page).

How does an icon get into the voting pool? Automagically. Any unsold game that has been uploaded within a month and is visible to developers or sponsors will automatically have its icon entered into the voting pool. Once an icon has at least 10 votes, the game’s authors can find the “icon hotness” on the game-view page underneath the description.

Remember that better icons mean more clicks from sponsors. And after your game launches, better icons mean more clicks from gamers, too! So please take care to make the best icon you can.

Speaking of icons after the game launches… we realized that we’ve been leaving sponsors out of the equation. Sponsors often need to pick the best icons, too! Many will use a game’s FGL icon, but sometimes that icon doesn’t strike their fancy (or their target demographic’s fancy) and they need to make custom icons. Now they can get their custom icons rated, too. The multi-icon upload page lets you add extra icons to the voting pool to get rated. The number of icons you can upload is determined by your Market Level. (And this feature is available to developers too, in case you have several icons and can’t decide which to use.)

PS – We’re still early in the voting (and we’re still tweaking the methodology) but you can already see some clear trends in the Top 100 Icons list and the Bottom 100 Icons list. And there’s a Middle 100 Icons list, too… the most average icons!