2012 Independent Games Festival Reveals Student Entries

Author: by Staff

The organizers of the 14th Annual Independent Games Festival -- the longest-running and largest festival relating to independent games worldwide -- are proud to announce another year of record entry numbers for IGF 2012's Student Competition. In total, this year's Student Competition took in nearly 300 game entries across all platforms -- PC, console and mobile -- from a wide diversity of the most prestigious universities and games programs from around the world. Together with the record Main Competition entries, this year's IGF has taken in over 850 total entries -- the largest number in the festival's history across the Main and Student competitions. This year's Student Competition includes entries like Roadeo, from a team at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, a two player racing game where the car races in competition (or cooperation) with the road itself, and Fingle, an iPad game in which you "playfully encounter the touch of another's fingers" and experience "the thrills of touching each other on a multi-touch device", from a student team at the Utrecht School of the Arts. This year's entries also include Harmonic Flight -- from the School of Art and Design Kassel team that previously entered games like Ute and 2010 Student Showcase finalist Ulitsa Dimitrova -- a unique Facebook game in which individual players work together to keep a flight attendent happy and ensure a safe arrival of their flight. 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. Now in its tenth 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 their forthcoming Journey. This year's Student IGF entries will be checked and distributed to a host of notable industry judges for evaluation, before finalists are announced in January 2012, and winners awarded at the IGF ceremony during the Game Developers Conference 2012 -- part of the UBM TechWeb Game Network, as is this website -- in San Francisco next March.