Hazard-The-Journey-of-Life posts

While the Independent Games Festival has already announced most of the the nominees for the 2011 awards, the folks at the PC game download site Direct2Drive have now announced the nominees for this year's Vision Award. The five games were picked from the finalists of this year's IGF listed games and are competing for a $10,000 prize among other awards.

The five games nominated this year are:
Flotilla - Blendo Games
Confetti Carnival - SpikySnail Games
Hazard: The Journey for Life - Alexander Bruce's Demruth
NightSky - Nicalis
Amnesia: The Dark Descent - Frictional Games

Meanwhile there's still time for people to vote for their favorite game in the IGF's Audience Awards. Votes will be taken until midnight Pacific time on February 18.

The second annual Indie Game Challenge has announced its finalist for the 2011 edition of the independent game competition sponsored by The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, GameStop and The Guildhall. Like last year, six finalists each were picked for the non-professional and professional categories. You can check out the finalist after the jump.

All of the nominated teams will be flown to the DICE Summit in Las Vegas where the winning game and team in each category will be announced on February 11. The winning team in both categories will get $100,000. All of the team will also be able to have meeting with top publishers. In addition the Indie Game Challenge will also name the winner of the Kongregate Award for best browser-based game.

Created by Alexander Bruce using the Unreal Development Kit (UDK), Hazard: The Journey of Life is one of the more esoteric games to come around. Combining art and philosophy, the game is based on making choices followed by cerebral puzzles that are solved not by understanding the mechanics, but through the use of skill.

"Hazard is a philosophical first-person single-player exploration puzzle art game. The game presents no goals directly to the player, but they create goals for themselves based on what they know of the world. This game requires patience. Life isn't easy!"

Download Hazard: The Journey of Life UDK Demo (141 MB)
Download Unreal Development Kit (762 MB)
Check out all Unreal Development Kit related Downloads

It's been a long time since the contest started but this week Epic Games finally revealed the grand prize winners in their second Make Something Unreal mod contest. Using Unreal Tournament 3 as its basis, mod makers created games for the ultimate prize of $50,000 and more importantly a full Unreal Engine 3 license which would allow the mod team to release a full commercial game.

The grand prize winner turned out to be The Haunted, an impressive third person survival horror-style shooter. You can bet that a full stand alone version is in the works. Indeed many of the runners-up for the contest have already released stand alone demos via the Unreal Development Kit. You can check out the list of winners after the jump: