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.
