2010 IGF Reveals Student Showcase Winners

[01.17.10]

The Independent Games Festival, the popular industry event highlighting and awarding the talents of independent game developers, has announced the winners of the 2010 IGF Student Showcase, which recognizes outstanding indie game development taking place on school and university campuses around the world. 

This year's set of ten Student Showcase winners include titles such as Utrecht School of the Arts & USC's virtual paper-folding puzzle game Paper Cakes, DePaul University's first-person 'sound visualization' title Devil's Tuning Fork, and Chalmers University's ingenious card-shuffling platform game Continuity.

These ten games will go on to compete for the Best Student Game Prize, announced on stage at the Independent Games Festival Awards, held Thursday, March 11, 2010, in San Francisco at Game Developers Conference 2010. 

The Student Showcase-winning games -- all of which will also be playable at the IGF Pavilion on the GDC 2010 show floor -- were chosen from a remarkable field of entries by an opt-in subset of the more than 150 notable game industry figures judging the IGF Main Competition. 

The full list of this year's winners is as follows:

Boryokudan Rue (UCLA)

Continuity (Chalmers University of Technology / University of Gothenburg)

Devil's Tuning Fork (DePaul University)

Dreamside Maroon (DigiPen Institute Of Technology)

Igneous (DigiPen Institute Of Technology)

Paper Cakes (Utrecht School of the Arts & USC)

Puddle (ENJMIN, France)

Puzzle Bloom (DADIU, Denmark)

Spectre (USC Interactive Media)

Ulitsa Dimitrova (Kunsthochschule Kassel, Germany)

Chosen from a new record of 190 IGF Student Showcase entries (up over 30% on last year’s 145 entries), these Student Showcase-winning games each win $500 and GDC 2010 show passes, and will go on to compete for an overall Best Student Game prize, which includes a special trophy and a $2,500 cash prize. 

In addition, the IGF judges would like to highlight ten more outstanding Student Showcase entries for honorable mentions this year, recommending them to the public. 

Honorable mentions go to the following titles: ASCIIp0rtal (Utah State University), Conquest (Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg & University of Primorska), Endless Frog Kids (UC Berkeley), Gear (DigiPen Institute of Technology), Mi (Odessa National University), NormalTanks(Tyumen State Oil and Gas University), Runesinger (USC), Spinnr (Frostburg State University), Sultans Of Scratch (Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy), The Last Dance (IdEC UPF, Barcelona).

Previous notable IGF Student Showcase honorees have included DigiPen’sNarbacular Drop (which later evolved into Valve’s acclaimed Portal), USC’sThe Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom (debuting on Xbox Live Arcade next month), Hogeschool van de Kunsten’s The Blob (made into a console title by THQ as De Blob), and early USC/ThatGameCompany (Fl0w, Flower) titleCloud. 

“We’re delighted to see the IGF Student Showcase continuing to highlight some outstanding student-created titles from all over the world,” said Simon Carless, IGF chairman. “Congratulations to all the winners, and we're very much looking forward to showing them to the public at Game Developers Conference this March.”

The Independent Games Festival was established in 1998 by Game Developers Conference organizer Think Services to recognize the best independent game developers, in the way that the Sundance Film Festival honors the independent film community. IGF Main Competition finalists were announced earlier this month, and a separate set of finalists -- for the IGF Mobile competition -- will debut in late January. 

For more information on the Independent Games Festival, please visit the official IGF website -- and for those interested in registering for GDC 2010, which includes the Independent Games Summit, the IGF Pavilion and the IGF Awards Ceremony, please visit the official Game Developers Conference website.

[Originally posted on Gamasutra]