2015 Intel® Level Up Game Dev Contest – And the Winners Are:

The Intel® Level Up contest winners amaze and inspire us every year, and this year’s winners have done it again! From the psychedelic adventures of a naïve worm, to a puzzle adventure game based on the writings of Franz Kafka, to a steampunk RPG, this year’s crop of winners has something for everyone. Computer game genres are heavily blurred as the winning entries also include a 2D point-and-click horror adventure, a shooter/musical/puzzle mix, and not one but two shooter/tower defense games. Winners include entries from Canada, Russia, Poland, Singapore, Australia, and the United States.

Each year the thing I look forward to most is running the Intel® Level Up Game Dev Contest – both promoting the contest to indie game devs and helping them understand our mission statement: “to help game developers succeed on Intel” as well as engaging with the winners of the contest from the time they’re notified and hopefully downstream for many years to come. This activity is rewarding because it helps attract talented, new game developers to Intel platforms and it also allows us to help some developers break through barriers in their quest to succeed in the video game market. On a personal level, the relationships I’ve formed with developers around the world have been immensely gratifying as well.

Earlier this spring at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco we opened the 2015 contest for submissions. This year we added one new category – Linux with full controller support. In addition to partnering with Valve, both Epic and Unity came on board as sponsors to help promote the contest. Game devs submitted their not-yet-for-sale (on PC or Linux) playable proofs-of-concept, alphas, betas, and unreleased demos for a chance to win cash prizes and ultimately be published on Steam*. The contest focused on innovation in gaming through the use of 2 in1 devices. After evaluation by our external panel of judges, 10 teams have emerged victorious!

So (drum roll please!) here are the champions! Across the 11 prize categories plus Game of the Year, 10 teams from around the world have reached Elite Status and are winners of the 2015 Intel® Level Up Game Dev Contest.

The Game of the Year, The Franz Kafka Videogame by Denis Galanin is a puzzle adventure game based on writings of Franz Kafka. The protagonist named K. gets a sudden offer of employment. And this event changes his life, forcing him to make a distant voyage. To his surprise, the world beyond his homeland appears to be not as normal as he would think. Together with K. you will experience an atmosphere of absurdity, surrealism, and total uncertainty.

The list below includes the winners in all of the contest categories. New, interesting, creative, challenging, beautiful, inspiring, fun…there are lots of reasons to try out all of these new games. To learn more about all the winners, check out the Hall of Glory, or (thanks to our contest sponsor Valve*) try out their demos on Steam*. If you'll be at PAX Prime in Seattle, stop by the Intel booth. We'll be demonstrating all of the winning games, and you can meet some of the winning teams!

I’d like to thank our sponsors, Valve, Epic and Unity who helped to promote Level Up. We also want to thank  all of the game devs who submitted an astonishing array of fun and interesting games. Without your year-on-year interest and submissions this contest would not be possible.

I’d also like to once again thank our external panel of judges. The fact that this contest is juried by a panel of industry luminaries makes it that much more rewarding for the winners. Our contest judges provided a valuable service to the video game industry by contributing their time and expertise to help find and reward future video game development stars.

Cheers!

Mitch