The organizers of the 16th annual Independent Games Festival -- the longest-running and largest festival relating to independent games worldwide -- are proud to announce another year of record entries for IGF 2014's Student Competition.
This year's Student Competition, which will display finalists and show winners at Game Developers Conference 2014, took in almost 350 game entries across all platforms -- PC, console and mobile -- from a wide variety of the most prestigious universities, games programs, and even high schools from around the world.
Together with the Main Competition submissions, this year's IGF has taken in over 1,000 total entries -- once again surpassing the festival's record across the Main and Student Competitions.
This year's Student Competition includes lauded entries such as University of Washington-developed and over 400% Kickstarted action platformer roguelike-like Risk of Rain and HKU University of the Arts Utrecht-developed Wild West action adventure Westerado.
Several student entries take advantage of the latest in motion and VR technologies. The University of Southern California-developed exploration game Anamnesis uses the Oculus Rift as a second screen to scan 'psychological imprints' left by missing quarantined inhabitants. The UCLA Game Lab- and Filmakademy Baden-Wurttemberg-developed Perfect Woman uses the Kinect controller as players mimic poses of women at different stages in their life.
Among the student entries are even some game adaptations of popular fiction, such as Miami/American University-developed E.A. Poe's Tell Tale Heart, simulating the manical story's blood stain scrubbing and pillow suffocating with mobile devices, and Miami University of Ohio's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, which is based on Ambrose Bierce's Civil War story and which contains a similar irregular sequence of events and twist ending.
The above are just a small selection of the games now available for browsing via IGF.com, where you'll find more information, screenshots and video for each of the IGF Student Competition entries.
The festival's organizers have added an official Student Competition JSON feed, added to the existing Main Competition feed, updated every 30 minutes from live back end data. Teams can update info on their games and have the official entry page change, and third parties are welcome to use this feed to make their own custom IGF entry lists and pages.
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. These include 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 and PC); Hogeschool van de Kunsten's The Blob (later becoming acclaimed console titleDe Blob); and early USC/thatgamecompany title Cloud, from the studio that would go on to develop PlayStation arthouse mainstays like Flower and Journey.
This year's Student IGF entries will be checked and distributed to a host of notable industry judges for evaluation before Student Showcase winners are announced in January 2014. The Best Student Game winner will be awarded at the IGF ceremony during the Game Developers Conference 2014 in San Francisco next March.
