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The Independent Games Festival has announced the eight Student Showcase winners for the fourteenth annual presentation of its prestigious awards, celebrating the brightest and most innovative creations to come out of universities and games programs from around the world in the past year.

This year's showcase of top student talent includes the lithograph-sketched 2D logic puzzler The Bridge, from Case Western Reserve University, Art Institute of Phoenix's magic-moth platformer Dust, and DigiPen Institute of Technology's part-psychological-evaluator, part-boot-camp-instructor, possibly-part-malware action game Nous.

In total, this year's Student Competition took in nearly 300 game entries across all platforms -- PC, console and mobile -- from a wide diversity of the world's most prestigious universities and games programs making the Student IGF one of the world's largest showcases of student talent.

All of the Student Showcase winners announced today will be playable on the Expo show floor at the 26th Game Developers Conference, to be held in San Francisco starting March 5th, 2012. Each team will receive a $500 prize for being selected into the Showcase, and are finalists for an additional $3,000 prize for Best Student Game, to be revealed during the Independent Games Festival Awards on March 7th.

The full list of Student Showcase winners for the 2012 Independent Games Festival, along with 'honorable mentions' to those top-quality games that didn't quite make it to finalist status, are as follows:

The Bridge (Case Western Reserve University)
Dust (Art Institute of Phoenix)
The Floor Is Jelly (Kansas City Art Institute)
Nous (DigiPen Institute of Technology)
One and One Story (Liceo Scientifico G.B. Morgagni)
Pixi (DigiPen Institute of Technology - Singapore)
The Snowfield (Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab)
Way (Carnegie Mellon University, Entertainment Technology Center)

Honorable mentions: Be Good (DigiPen Institute of Technology); Lilith's Pet (University of Kassel); Nitronic Rush (DigiPen Institute of Technology); Once Upon A Spacetime (RMIT); Tink (Mediadesign Highschool of Applied Sciences)

In this latest update for the 2012 Game Developers Conference, the show's organizers have debuted new and notable talks within the Production and Business, Marketing, & Management tracks, detailing new sessions on Words With Friends, frustration management at IO Interactive, The Witcher 2, and the Indie Summer Uprising.

The Production and Business, Marketing, & Management tracks are but two of the seven full-featured tracks at the upcoming San Francisco show, covering the industry's most important management trends and its emerging business strategies, respectively.

The following are the latest sessions to be highlighted for these two Main Conference tracks, taking place on the Wednesday to Friday, March 7th-9th, of GDC 2012:

Production

- In "Words With Friends: Building and Growing a Game on the Top of the Charts," Zynga With Friends CTO Vijay Thakkar will discuss how the studio's popular word-scramble game grew from a modest, small scale title into one of the top juggernauts of mobile gaming.

Thakkar will further detail the technical challenges developers can expect to face when managing any project that grows to encompass multi-platform, or even cross-team development.

- Elsewhere, Square Enix and IO Interactive's user research manager, Janus Rau Sorensen, will offer advice to help weed out overly frustrating bottlenecks from a game's design. Throughout his talk, "Arrrgghh!!! - Blending Quantitative and Qualitative Methods to Detect Player Frustration," Sorensen will delve into a computational model that helps identify patterns of frustration, helping developers quantitatively assess which parts of their game need extra attention. Sorensen's presentation was co-written by Dr. Alessandro Canossa of Information Technology University of Copenhagen.

In addition to these talks, GDC organizers have previously detailed Production track sessions covering BioWare's approach to product ownership with the Dragon Age franchise, and Naughty Dog's internal approach to remaining detail-oriented while still shipping on time.

Business, Marketing, & Management

- Using examples from the critically-acclaimed The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, CD Projekt RED joint CEO Marcin Iwinski will outline show studios can develop blockbuster franchises while operating on a modest budget. His talk, dubbed "Witcher 2: How CD Projekt RED Sold Over a Million Copies of its Exclusive PC Game And How You Can Too," will go over the conception, development, and eventual sales of the Witcher franchise, providing an inside look at the business of this fantasy role-playing series.

This week, organizers of the 2012 Game Developers Conference have detailed three new Main Conference talks, including a panel of industry legends looking at lessons from the past, a lecture on the death of game consoles, and Bastion's Greg Kasavin on creating atmosphere in games.

The 26th GDC show will take place Monday, March 5 through Friday, March 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and the Main Conference (March 7th-9th) offers six tracks covering key disciplines in the games industry, including Audio, Business, Marketing & Management, Game Design, Production, Programming, and Visual Arts.

The following lectures are the newest highlights for GDC 2012's Main Conference:

- In the Game Design track, notable developers and industry leaders such as Lionhead's Peter Molyneux, Doom creator John Romero, Epic's Cliff Bleszinski, and Firaxis' Sid Meier (Civilization) will host "Forgotten Tales Remembered: The Games that Inspired Leading Innovators", moderated by Director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games, JP Dyson.

During this panel, the creators will take some time to look back on their careers and present the games that inspired them most, offering insight into the lessons we can still pull from these titles today. Along the way, the will examine how technological growth causes some design elements to lose their luster, while others will forever stand the test of time.

- Over in the Business, Marketing, & Management track, highly rated speaker Ben Cousins of Ngmoco Sweden (formerly general manager of EA's free-to-play-focused Battlefield Heroes home Easy Studios) will discuss the future and potential demise of the traditional video game console.

His lecture, "When the Consoles Die - What Comes Next?," will examine the ever-expanding range of game-enabled devices, detailing how these new platforms could threaten the existence of the console market as we know it, and how developers can prepare for this paradigm shift.

Organizers have revealed the finalists for the 12th annual Game Developers Choice Awards, the leading peer-based video game industry event celebrating the industry's top games and developers.

Nominations this year are led by three studios and their games, each of which received five Choice Award nods, including Bethesda Game Studios' long awaited open-world fantasy RPG The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and Valve's cunning, charming sci-fi puzzle action title Portal 2.

Also nominated five times was newcomer Supergiant Games and its acclaimed downloadable action RPG Bastion, which saw nominations in four categories, plus one for the studio itself, for Best Debut.

Both Portal 2 and Skyrim were nominated for Game Of The Year as one of their nods. The other Game Of The Year nominees are Rocksteady Studios's dark superhero game sequel Batman: Arkham City, From Software's immersive hardcore RPG Dark Souls, and Eidos Montreal's acclaimed franchise update Deus Ex: Human Revolution, also all multiple award-nominated.

Other titles with multiple nominations include Naughty Dog's action adventure Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, and Team Bondi's detective title L.A. Noire. A diverse set of overall nominees include titles with digital-physical crossover (Toys for Bob's Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure - for Innovation), free-to-play elements to the fore (NimbleBit's Tiny Tower - for Best Handheld/Mobile Game), and even no visual display at all (Die Gute Fabrik's Johann Sebastian Joust - for Innovation).

Overall, the Game Developers Choice Awards are open to any video game, with no restrictions or payment for game submission, with open nominations from a plethora of game professionals helping to choose this year's finalists. Winners will now be selected by the Game Developers Choice Awards-specific International Choice Awards Network (ICAN), which is an invitation-only group comprised of 500 leading game creators from all parts of the video game industry.

Organizers of Game Developers Conference 2012 have debuted the latest batch of tutorials for the March event in San Francisco, featuring full-day sessions on HTML5, physics simulation, Scrum, and game usability.

These first-come first-served tutorials will take place alongside the GDC Summits on Monday, March 5th and Tuesday, March 6th -- the first two days of the five-day San Francisco-based event.

The tutorials will be open to those with an All-Access Pass or Summits & Tutorials Pass who select the tutorial during the registration process, and those interested in learning more about either of these options can do so at the official GDC website's passes page.

The newly-announced tutorials for Game Developers Conference 2012, part of a growing selection, include the following:

- In the in-depth "HTML5 Tutorial Day," Google software developer Rachel Blum and Bocoup programmer Darius Kazemi will share their experience and offer advice on creating games in HTML5. The full-day tutorial will open with a detailed overview on what game developers need to know about HTML5, followed by a series of lectures on art APIs, WebGL programming, brief postmortems of HTML5 games, and much more.

This session is targeted primarily at experienced game programmers, and will ensure that even developers with no prior knowledge of HTML5 will leave with a solid understanding of what it takes to build games for the web.

- Physics simulation has become an increasingly important aspect of game development, and the "Physics for Games Programmers" tutorial will return to GDC to focus on the tools and techniques developers should know when implementing physics in their games. A panel of speakers from Nvidia, AMD, Sony, Blizzard, and more will go over the various aspects of the simulation pipeline and demonstrate how common problems can be solved with standard mathematics and engineering know-how.

- Industry veteran and consultant Clinton Keith will host the "Scrum Essentials Tutorial," providing an in-depth overview of how Scrum works and what it means for game development. Keith has been actively employing Scrum development for more than eight years, and will leverage this experience to show how it can be used in studios of all sizes and for any type of game.

Game Developers Conference 2012 organizers have debuted 200+ GDC sessions in its Schedule Builder, with new highlights featuring a behind the scenes look at Gears of War 3, a breakdown of our psychological need to play, and Ninja Theory's approach to motion capture.

The 26th GDC show will take place Monday, March 5 through Friday, March 9 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, and the Main Conference (March 7th-9th) offers six tracks covering key disciplines in the games industry, including Audio, Business, Marketing & Management, Game Design, Production, Programming, and Visual Arts.

The following lectures are the newest highlights for GDC 2012's Main Conference:

- In the Visual Arts track, Epic Games artist Francois Antoine will detail how a very small art team managed to create all of the effects for the studio's big-budget shooter, Gears of War 3 (pictured).

The talk, dubbed, "Production Culture: How Two and a Half Artists Completed the FX for Gears of War 3," will provide an inside look at Epic's approach to game production, exploring how it affects nearly all elements of the game development process, from hiring, to tool development and beyond.

- In the Game Design track, the always enthusiastic Jason VandenBerghe (creative director at Ubisoft on Far Cry 3) will host "The 5 Domains of Play: Applying Psychology's Big 5 Motivation Domains to Games."

Drawing from research and scientific evidence, VandenBerghe will examine the five psychological traits linked to motivation, and explore the ways developers can use this information to improve their approach to game design, playtesting, and reaching out to new audiences.

- In this week's second Visual Arts lecture highlight, Ninja Theory chief creative officer Tameem Antoniades will pick apart the motion capture process his studio uses to create believable in-game cinematics in titles like Enslaved and the upcoming Devil May Cry.

The talk, "Performance Capture: A Creative Primer," will detail the procedure from beginning to end, offering tips on how to best work with mocap actors, direct virtual scenes, and more.

Organizers of Game Developers Conference 2012 have announced a January 6th, 2012 early registration deadline for the show's GDC Play showcase, which allows emerging game creators to showcase and business match at dedicated individual kiosks on site at the Moscone Center.

GDC Play -- which will take place March 6-7 during GDC 2012 -- is a brand new, dedicated program that will give emerging game developers a chance to show off their games to a host of specially-invited industry decision makers, in addition to the 19,000-strong GDC attendee base.

The showcase itself, which takes the place of Game Connection as the event's official showcase for emerging developers, will take place in a dedicated hall with areas themed around emerging games markets, all within the same buildings as all GDC lectures and keynotes.

As part of the showcase for GDC 2012, show organizers are offering to all exhibitors (including GDC Play participants) a full business matching software solution that will make it easy to request and coordinate meetings with key decision makers, as well as any All-Access Pass holders or other exhibitors attending the show.

In addition, former IGDA executive director Jason Della Rocca has signed on as a consultant to the GDC Play showcase, and will help ensure the attendance of key publishers, distributors, and investors. Jason Della Rocca is a renowned consultant in the games industry, and has years of experience working with game studios and organizations worldwide. In 2009, Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine named him among the publication's "Game Developer 50," which profiles the 50 most important contributors to the industry.