The winners of the third Indie Showcase, which was sponsored by Unity, have been announced at this year’s Develop in Brighton Conference which was held, funnily enough in Brighton.
There were three awards up for grabs: The People’s Choice, The Editor’s Choice and finally the Indie Showcase Overall Winner which was scooped up by Ibb and Obb. Ibb and Obb was developed by Sparpweed and is a PlayStation 3 game designed around co-op play where two players find themselves in a world split in two.
The judging panel for the Indie Showcase Overall Winner included:
- Adam Green, chair
- Pete Smith, Sony
- Simon Byron, Premier PR
- Phil Gaskill, Ripstone
- Jon Jordan, Pocketgamer.biz
- Simon Barratt, Four Door Lemon
In the other categories, the People’s Choice award went to That Dragon, Cancer by Josh Larson and Ryan Green, a game created to help Ryan’s four year old son Joel in his three year battle against cancer. The Editors’ Choice went to Gunpoint by Suspicious Development, a PC stealth puzzle game developed by former games journalist Tom Francis.
Andy Brammall, regional sales director, Unity, had this to say:
“Three things struck me about this year’s finalists – the geographical diversity of the studios (developers came from the UK, the US, the Netherlands and Germany); the remarkable range of creativity and investigation of fun gameplay, and the ability of the developers to translate unique experiences into empathetic gameplay, as seen in That Dragon, Cancer.”
From the 80 entries received by the conference organisers this year, only 10 were short-listed for the showcase by the chair of the judging panel and managing director of Assyria Games, Adam Green. Each development studio received their own booth on the expo floor to promote themselves and their games as well as free expo passes and of course the chance to demo their game to more than 1,600 top developers and games industry professionals from all over the world.
The Develop in Brighton Conference is Europe’s leading conference for the indie game development community and this year it ran from 9-11 July. The 2014 dates for the event have been announced as 8-10 July, with speaker submissions opening in January 2014.
