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Friday, January 23, 2009

Games Big Ups to DigiPen

Posted by Sam Machkovech on Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 11:59 AM

...or, at least, one team of students attending game design classes over in Redmond. The seven-person squad behind Tag: The Power of Paint was picked today for an Independent Games Festival award nomination—rats off to ya!—and will be in San Fran in March to present their paint-the-world puzzler for a shot at the fest's Student Showcase award.

I couldn't get the game to run on my PC (why y'all hatin' on ATI cards?), but the walkthrough video below was telling enough. Tag isn't the first painting game concept to come along—see fellow IGF nominee The Unfinished Swan—but this locally designed title sets itself apart by using its color mechanic to great, puzzly effect. Considering this is the school that indirectly gave birth to 2007's Game of the Year, Portal, it's not surprising that this title appears to follow suit in all of the right ways. Good job, Tag Team, and good luck in SF.

(ht Slashdot)

Comments (7) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

Did you play/like de Blob? This reminds me of that.

Posted by stinkbug on January 23, 2009 at 12:08 PM

@1: Tag is de Blob times 20. You don't just paint walls; you use the "powers" of each color to solve puzzles. The implementation is very clever.

Posted by Sam M. on January 23, 2009 at 12:11 PM

Yeah, I wasn't dissin' this Tag thing, looks very clever, etc. But I just wanted to give a shout out to de Blob!

Posted by stinkbug on January 23, 2009 at 12:13 PM

I realize this isn't a product (yet) and that the purpose of removing color is needed, but forcing the player to remove the green off the ramp so that they could walk up it is extremely annoying.

I suppose it could just be shown there to educate the player that they HAVE the ability to delete paint...

Posted by Your Name Here on January 23, 2009 at 12:33 PM

I'm a sophomore at Digipen, and some of the teams who submitted to IGF this year got screwed. I can't believe some of the games that beat out certain Digipen games. One in particular is Froggle . You should check it out.

Like I said, I'm a sophomore, so I have nothing to do with Froggle (or the games that didn't get accepted). I'm not trying to plug anything.

Posted by Sweets on January 23, 2009 at 12:44 PM

I worked on a game that won the IGF best student game 2008. Check it out at http://www.toblo.info.

Posted by John Jensen on January 23, 2009 at 1:31 PM

Joshua from TAG TEAM.

Thanks for your support guys.
I wish I could have seen more of our school games at IGF. Glitch and Froggle you guys put in alot of work in your game and BIG PROPS to you guys. as well as the other digipen games.

Posted by Joshua Jones on January 23, 2009 at 6:32 PM