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23rd January 2013

VFS Student Game Pulse Among 2013 IGF Student Showcase Winners

mini-orbyThe Independent Games Festival has announced the eight Student Showcase winners for the fifteenth annual presentation of its prestigious awards, celebrating the brightest and most innovative creations to come out of universities and games programs from around the world in the past year. This year’s showcase of top student talent include the first-person meta-videogame ATUM, from the Netherlands’ NHTV IGAD, the similarly meta-game-ified pen & paper RPG Knights of Pen & Paper, from Brazil’s Instituto de Ensino Superior de Brasilia & Universidade de Brasilia, and the  Jet Set Radio-esque Zineth, a game which “celebrates speed, movement & Twitter”, from students of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

In total, this year’s Student Competition took in over 300 game entries across all platforms – PC, console and mobile – from a wide diversity of the world’s most prestigious universities and games programs making the Student IGF one of the world’s largest showcases of student talent.

All of the Student Showcase winners announced today will be playable on the Expo show floor at the  27th Game Developers Conference, to be held in San Francisco starting March 25th, 2013. Each team will receive a $1,000 prize for being selected into the Showcase, and are finalists for an additional $3,000 prize for Best Student Game, to be revealed during the Independent Games Festival Awards on March 27th.

The full list of Student Showcase winners for the 2013 Independent Games Festival, along with ‘honorable mentions’ to those top-quality games that didn’t quite make it to finalist status, are as follows:

Honorable mentions:

This year’s Student IGF entries were distributed to an opt-in subset of the main competition judging body, consisting of more than 100 leading independent and mainstream developers, academics and journalists.

Now in its eleventh year as a part of the larger Independent Games Festival, the Student Showcase highlights up-and-coming talent from worldwide university programs, and has served as the venue which first premiered numerous now-widely-recognized names including DigiPen’s Narbacular Drop and  Tag: The Power of Paint, which would evolve first into Valve’s acclaimed Portal, with the latter brought on-board for Portal 2.

Others include USC’s  The Misadventures Of P.B. Winterbottom (later released by 2K Games for XBLA); Hogeschool van de Kunsten’s The Blob (later becoming one of THQ’s flagship mobile/console franchises as De Blob); and early USC/ThatGameCompany title  Cloud, from the studio that would go on to develop PlayStation 3 arthouse mainstays like Flow, Flower, and Journey.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013 at 11:08 am and is filed under Awards, Education, Events, Game Dev, National News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  1. Tami Quiring (@VillageGamer)
    3:09 am on January 23rd, 2013

    .@VFS Student Game Pulse Among 2013 IGF Student Showcase Winners http://t.co/CY6eQmNW

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