igf-student-showcase-2012
Latest
'What's it like to have your indie game stolen?'
No journalist, friend or decent human being wants to ask that question, especially not to an 18-year-old first-time developer who recently saw success as a student finalist in IGF 2012. Unfortunately, today we asked Mattia Traverso that very thing about his game One and One Story, after the events unfolded live on his Twitter feed: Traverso alerted the community that One and One Story had been counterfieted with "THEY STOLE MY GAME" and a succession of five tweets that included seven capitalized f-bombs.One and One Story hadn't been cloned or copied, but it was completely stolen -- code, graphics and all. The group that stole it implemented a few unused assets that were hidden in the game file, Traverso told Joystiq, and its version has completely broken animations and stretched graphics."It's kind of hilarious," Traverso said hours after his initial discovery. But when he first got the Google Alert and tracked down the stolen game to the App Store this morning, Traverso didn't find anything about the situation amusing."I panicked. I didn't know what to do, so I screamed on Twitter," he said.His screaming didn't go unnoticed and it drew the attention of other indies, including Canabalt's Adam Saltsman. Saltsman instructed Traverso to fill out a DMCA takedown, and two hours after his discovery Traverso was able to breathe a little easier.
Competing in the indie world is fun and games for IGF entrant Zarzecki
Matthias Zarzecki was waiting anxiously for the IGF Student Showcase finalists to be announced on Sunday, Jan. 15, where his game, Unstoppaball, was an entrant. He had steeled himself to endure the five days between finalist announcements for the main competition and the student one by programming new games relentlessly; indie-developer therapy, he described it. And then the Student Showcase finalists were announced on Friday, Jan. 13. Unstoppaball wasn't on the list, and Zarzecki could have let that pent-up anxiety and excitement explode in a livid email to the IGF for reporting incorrect announcement dates, or in a furious YouTube video calling on all developers to boycott the IGF -- but Zarzecki chose a different response. "My reaction was something of a 'huh, those games are really good,'" Zarzecki told Joystiq. He was a one-man team and had absolutely no budget, so Zarzecki could see how, out of the 300 games submitted to the IGF student competition, he may have been out-performed. "In that way it is a little disappointing to see that I was probably beaten through factors that were outside my influence," he said.
The IGF 2012 Student Showcase finalists are ...
We've got the final list of IGF Student Showcase finalists: The Bridge (Case Western Reserve University) Dust (Art Institute of Phoenix) The Floor Is Jelly (Kansas City Art Institute) Nous (DigiPen Institute of Technology) One and One Story (Liceo Scientifico G.B. Morgagni) Pixi (DigiPen Institute of Technology - Singapore) The Snowfield (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab) Way (Carnegie Mellon University, Entertainment Technology Center) Of the nearly 300 entrants, these eight were selected to move on to the final stage of the Independent Games Festival. Each receive a cash prize of $500, simply for being selected as finalists. They'll be playable on the show floor at this year's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, where one will win the top prize of $3,000.
