Ten student games garner special recognition.
Yesterday, the Independent Games Festival announced the winners of the 2006 IGF Student Showcase. Eight student game projects were selected from the 59 entries in the main Student Showcase category, plus an additional two projects from 17 submitted in a ‘middleware’ category.
Among the winners was the game, Ballistic, developed by Brandon Furtwangler, Brian Hasselbeck, and Scott Brodie, students at Michigan State University and members of the Spartasoft game development group at MSU. I had previously mentioned Ballistic back in October (in Game Competition Results) and am pleased to see that the IGF has recognized it this year. Incidentally, Spartasoft had a regularly scheduled meeting yesterday, and I imagine that it was an upbeat affair if they were notified in time.
The full list of winners:
- Ballistic (Michigan State University)
- Cloud (University of Southern California)
- Colormental (Full Sail)
- Ocular Ink (Grinnell)
- Narbacular Drop (DigiPen)
- Orblitz (DigiPen)
- Palette (SungKunKwan [South Korea])
- Sea of Chaos (DigiPen)
- Goliath [middleware] (Media Design School [New Zealand])
- NERO [middleware] (University of Texas)
I find it interesting that only two of the winners in the main category were from major universities, while half were from schools dedicated to game and multimedia education (3 from DigiPen Institute of Technology and 1 from Full Sail Real World Education). In any event, I think that this is a wonderful opportunity to showcase the talents of students interested in the game industry.
Congratulations to all of the winners!