One of the more interesting aspects of the annual Game Developers Conference is the Independent Games Festival, a showcase for some of the best and brightest people and ideas in the industry. Hidden among the next big indie games is the Student Showcase. Here, 10 student-developed games compete for the top prize and $2,500, and past Showcase winners have gone on to create games like Portal, Flower, and de Blob. This year featured a record 190 entries, and the chosen 10 showcase a bright future for the video game industry.
Let’s take a look at what students are bringing to the world of gaming; the breadth of ideas is impressive.
The sheer range of game experiences on display is remarkable. The only non-publicly available game, Boryokudan Rue, appears to be a traditional point-and-click adventure game, albeit with some gorgeous, Blade Runner-inspired visuals and an intriguing plot. Dreamside Maroon, meanwhile, focuses on exploration, as you traverse a surreal world while growing a vine to the moon.
Of course, there’s the requisite devilishly challenging and addicting puzzle game in the form of Continuity. The game allows you to shuffle through the environment like a deck of cards, creating your own route through the puzzle. It sounds confusing, but once you get a hang of the mechanic it becomes second nature. And with a great soundtrack and simple but solid visuals reminiscent of N—another former IGF winner—it’s hard to believe that Continuity isn’t a professionally developed game.
But a student game it is, developed by a team of four at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden over a 16 week period.
“The idea came up during one of our idea-generating meetings,” Stefan Mikaelsson, one fourth of that team, told Ars. “Nobody really took notice of the idea at first, but then Guy [Lima Jr., another member of the team] made a paper prototype of the idea a week later that proved that this really was an interesting idea with a lot of depth. It didn’t take much time, but being able to play a rough version of the game that used a coin as the character helped convey the idea much better than just words.”