A tech developer wins an independent game festival

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Daniel Carr recently won the award for best student game at the Independent Games Festival in San Francisco. Daniel Carr recently won the award for best student game at the Independent Games Festival in San Francisco.

Daniel Carr accepts the award for Best Student Play at the Independent Games Festival.  (Featured photo)

Daniel Carr accepts the award for Best Student Play at the Independent Games Festival. (Featured photo)

From a young age, Daniel Carr knew exactly what he wanted to do when he grew up.

“When I was in elementary school, ‘What do you want to be when you’re your age?’ When asked. My answer was a game developer,” he said.

In his last semester at Tech before graduating with a BS in Computer Science, Carr won the Best Student Game Award for an adventure game at the Independent Game Festival (IGF) in San Francisco. Slippery.

He began studying game development in high school, which eventually led him into game jamming — a competition that allows participants to create a game from scratch in a short amount of time. Despite not having immediate success in his first race, Carr kept going.

The game, a PC title where players solve puzzles and rearrange maps to reconnect humanity, was pulled from a November 2021 tournament. The game received positive feedback after its release, and when Carr felt like there was more to be done, he got around to it. Let the project fall by the wayside.

“I remember along the way, I had a lot of doubts,” he recalled. “I asked myself: “Should I carry this all the way? I remember someone telling me that you have to believe in yourself at the beginning of your vision because while you are working on it, you doubt yourself a lot. And I did that and I continued to work on it. “

Carr looked to the tech community for help and submitted the game to the Georgia Tech Video Game Development Club (VGDev) in January 2022. Work on the play continued over the next two semesters and they entered. Slippery to the IGF, which received over 600 entries, later that year. Carr and his team didn’t wait for a response, but to their surprise, they were named one of six finalists in the student category in early January.

Over spring break, Carr and six other VGDev members traveled to San Francisco for the conference. Carr still didn’t believe it was possible to win, so when Slippery It was revealed during the award ceremony, he was really shocked. He took the stage and reflected on the hard work put into the development of the game by nearly 30 individuals over the years.

While winning was the highlight of the trip, Carr found himself equally captivated by the international language of the game.

“One of the coolest things was seeing how much of a global community there is around game development – ​​there were all kinds of games from European countries, Latin America and all over the world. Everyone is making games.”

Playable display Slippery It’s available on Steam, and Carr plans to release the link through development in hopes of expanding the game’s reach. As someone who grew up on PC gaming, he knows the platform is accessible to a wide audience. Despite the recent awards, he stated that the game is not a finished product, but he plans to continue working on it, taking his own advice and trusting his vision.

With a degree in hand, Carr is now interning with Amazon and will return to Tech in the fall to earn his master’s degree in computational intelligence. He plans to keep game development as a hobby for the time being, but admits he won’t close the door to pursuing it as a career in the future.

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