2006 IGF Student Showcase Winners Announced

The organizers of the 2006 Independent Games Festival have announced this year's IGF Student Showcase winners, all outstanding student-created independent PC games that will be showcased at Game Developers Conference in San Jose this March. This year's winners in the overarching Student Showcase category include the much-discussed University of Southern California's Cloud, a human flight game "that lets you fly through the clouds, make shapes in the sky, and create storms to purify the air", as well as DigiPen's Narbacular Drop, a cunning "environmental puzzle [first-person] game" using portals that has been licensed by Valve for a forthcoming Steam-downloadable, Source-engine version. In addition, other winners include Michigan State University's physics action-puzzle game Ballistic, SungKyunKwan University's South Korean stained-glass window puzzle title Palette, Full Sail's side-scrolling, abstract color-creating platform title Colormental, DigiPen's nautical 3D combat game Sea Of Chaos, Grinnell University's paintbrush-wielding eyeball adventure game Ocular Ink, and DigiPen's fiendish 3D puzzle title OrBlitz. Also awarded as winners in a new Middleware student category, freshly set up for this year's Independent Games Festival competition, were the Auckland, New Zealand Media Design School's team-based vehicle action game Goliath and The University of Texas' robot training title NERO. The IGF Student Showcase is one of three competitions in this year's Independent Games Festival - finalists in the 2006 IGF Main Competition were announced last month, and finalists in the inaugural IGF Mod Competition will be revealed later today.