The 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:
ATUM (NHTV IGAD)
Back to Bed (Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment)
Blackwell's Asylum (Danish Academy of Digital Interactive Entertainment)
Farsh (NHTV IGAD)
Knights of Pen & Paper (IESB - Instituto de Ensino Superior de Brasilia & UnB - Universidade de Brasilia)
the mindfulxp volume (Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center)
Pulse (Vancouver Film School)
Zineth (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
Honorable mentions: Anodyne (University of Chicago and Carleton College); Chrono Disfunglement (DigiPen Institute of Technology Singapore); The Moonlighters (University of Southern California, Interactive Media Division); Narcosis (ENJMIN); Plushy Knight (Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy); SerpenteS (ENJMIN); SneakSneak (Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht); Tales From The Minus Lab (University of Southern California)
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.
For more information on the Independent Games Festival, for which Main Competition finalists were also just announced, please visit the official IGF website -- and for those interested in registering for GDC 2013, which includes the Independent Games Summit, the IGF Pavilion and the IGF Awards Ceremony, please visit the Game Developers Conference website.
