The 17th annual Independent Games Festival — the longest-running and largest independent games festival worldwide — is months away, and today officials are proud to announce another year of record entries for IGF 2015’s Student Competition. This year’s Student Competition, which will display finalists and show winners at Game Developers Conference 2015 in March, took in over 360 game entries across all platforms — console, PC and mobile — from a broad array of the most prestigious universities, games programs, and even high schools around the world. Together with the Main Competition submissions, this year’s IGF has taken in over 1,000 entries total — once again surpassing the festival’s record across the Main and Student Competitions. This year’s Student Competition includes notable entries like Static Games’ off-kilter life sim Mendel’s Farm, the first-person platformer A Story About My Uncle from Gone North Games at Sweden’s Södertörn University, and Petrichor from students at Champlain College in Vermont. Many student entries also utilize either cutting-edge technology or commonplace items to create unique game experiences. For example, National Film & Television School student Ana Ribiero’s game Pixel Rift uses the Oculus Rift as a window into a virtual world where you discover the secrets of a ‘game within a game.’ On the other side of the tech spectrum, Play Design from Bloomfield College’s Thomas Johnston is an educational game meant to be played by children and adults using bits of wood, Legos and an old shoebox. The above are just a small selection of the games now available for browsing on the IGF website, where you’ll find more information, screenshots and video for each of the IGF Student Competition entries. To keep you abreast of the competition, festival organizers have added an official Student Competition JSON feed alongside the existing Main Competition feed, updated every 30 minutes from live back end data. Teams can update info on their games and have the official entry page change, and third parties are welcome to use this feed to make their own custom IGF entry lists and pages. As a part of the larger Independent Games Festival, the Student Showcase highlights up-and-coming talent from university programs around the world and has served as the venue which first premiered numerous now-widely-recognized names. These include 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. This year’s Student IGF entries will be checked and distributed to a host of notable industry judges for evaluation before Student Showcase winners are announced in January 2015. The Best Student Game winner will be awarded at the IGF ceremony during the Game Developers Conference 2015 in San Francisco. Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Tech.
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