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Independent Games Festival reveals 2014 Student Showcase winners
Independent Games Festival organizers have revealed the winners of this year's IGF Student Showcase category, honoring entries from the NHTV University of Applied Science, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Cambridge, among other institutions. This year's top picks feature Hopoo Games' run-and-gun roguelike platformer Risk of Rain, Albert Shih's forced-perspective puzzler Museum of Simulation Technology, and Hafiz Azman and Winston Lee's single-switch rhythm game Rhythm Doctor. Other winning games include Mahdi Bahrami and Moslem Rasouli's Engare, Philipp Beau and Daniel Goffin's Symmetrain, Ostrich Banditos' Westerado, Unblanched Peanuts' Foiled, and Hack n' Hide's Cyber Heist. Five additional games received honorable mentions. This year's IGF saw a record-breaking number of entries, including 346 projects developed by students. The IGF's Main Competition finalists were announced earlier this month, nominating indie standouts like The Stanley Parable, Device 6, and Papers, Please.
The Joystiq Indie Pitch: Back to Bed
Indie developers are the starving artists of the video-game world, often brilliant and innovative, but also misunderstood, underfunded and more prone to writing free-form poetry on their LiveJournals. We believe they deserve a wider audience with the Joystiq Indie Pitch: This week, Klaus Petersen and Bedtime Gaming talk about artistic IGF student finalist Back to Bed. Check out the Kickstarter here. What's your game called and what's it about?Our game is called Back to Bed. It is a 3D puzzle platformer, wherein the player has to help a sleepwalker reach the safety of his bed by navigating him through a surreal and dreamlike environment.How did you hear that Back to Bed was an IGF Student Showcase finalist and has that changed how you approach the game's development?Well, we just read it on one of the game news sites, when the student showcase "winners" were announced, which of course caused celebration.But yes, the IGF nomination changed alot of things. Besides giving the team a giant boost, it also gives us the great window of opportunity to show our game to a lot of people. It also builds up a little pressure, I guess. But it's just things like this that makes the long hours during crunch worthwhile.%Gallery-179506%
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.
