IGF Student Showcase Finalists Announced
DigiPen Institute of Technology was the only school represented multiple times, with its teams grabbing three finalist slots. Each finalist will receive a $500 stipend, and the overall winning team will granted a $5000 award when the IGF ceremony is held on March 7 during this year's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. The IGF website also pointed out the latest schedule details pertaining to the Independent Games Summit, hosted at GDC. Delivering the keynote address will be veteran indie developer and Llamasoft founder Jeff Minter. In case you missed them last year, here are some amusing screenshots from Minter's latest project, Space Giraffe (X360).
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Ah, student games. One part lame ripoff of commercial games, one part flash of brilliant innovation, the last the creators will come up with before they are submerged in the soul sucking world of corporate game development.
PS - at least some of these games are really great.-
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I hope you're joking. Making a student game takes a ridiculous amount of time and most of that is spent on technology. It takes a very large of work and, more importantly, time to craft your engine into a fun game. Student projects happen to be a rather strict timetable with no extensions.
Seriously dude, making fun of student projects for being derivative is just low. =[-
Alright, the comment was only semi-serious, but hear me out.
First off, I know you're at Digipen (right?) so I can understand your defensive response. I can understand the time constraints, and as a developer myself I can definitely appreciate the amount of work that goes into every project - I shouldn't have said "crap" at all and I apologize.
My comment was more about my disappointment in seeing obviously talented people spend their time on something that has already been done - and done better - in a commercial game. Student projects should be about pushing boundaries and experimentation, and I think it's unfortunate that many schools push engine creation more than the design (I also realize I'm probably being an idealist here, and I do understand that most schools want everything to be done by the students which necessitates an engine. I just know too many programmers who spend too much time on a general engine and then add a game to it as an afterthought. In an industry that is becoming dominated by a handful of commercial engines, I think time could be better spent elsewhere).
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Thats a fair argument and one with plenty of room for debate either way. To be fair we make fun of ourselves fairly often on how few people actually spend time making a game but rather a cool engine with flashy graphics or cool physics to land a job.
I often wonder what GuildHall's curriculum is like, but for some reason or another it isn't accessible on their website without registering. From what I can tell it seems they are a bit on the opposite spectrum of DigiPen in that they are more design and less engineer oriented. I could be completely wrong though.
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