One of the more interesting aspects of the annual Game Developers Conference is the Independent Games Festival, a showcase for some of the best and brightest people and ideas in the industry. Hidden among the next big indie games is the Student Showcase. Here, 10 student-developed games compete for the top prize and $2,500, and past Showcase winners have gone on to create games like Portal, Flower, and de Blob. This year featured a record 190 entries, and the chosen 10 showcase a bright future for the video game industry.

Let's take a look at what students are bringing to the world of gaming; the breadth of ideas is impressive.

The sheer range of game experiences on display is remarkable. The only non-publicly available game, Boryokudan Rue, appears to be a traditional point-and-click adventure game, albeit with some gorgeous, Blade Runner-inspired visuals and an intriguing plot. Dreamside Maroon, meanwhile, focuses on exploration, as you traverse a surreal world while growing a vine to the moon.

The puzzle continues

Of course, there's the requisite devilishly challenging and addicting puzzle game in the form of Continuity. The game allows you to shuffle through the environment like a deck of cards, creating your own route through the puzzle. It sounds confusing, but once you get a hang of the mechanic it becomes second nature. And with a great soundtrack and simple but solid visuals reminiscent of N—another former IGF winner—it's hard to believe that Continuity isn't a professionally developed game.

But a student game it is, developed by a team of four at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden over a 16 week period.

"The idea came up during one of our idea-generating meetings," Stefan Mikaelsson, one fourth of that team, told Ars. "Nobody really took notice of the idea at first, but then Guy [Lima Jr., another member of the team] made a paper prototype of the idea a week later that proved that this really was an interesting idea with a lot of depth. It didn't take much time, but being able to play a rough version of the game that used a coin as the character helped convey the idea much better than just words."

And Mikaelsson says that working with a small team helped them focus on what really counts: gameplay.

"Probably the most important thing we learned is the potential usefulness of limitations," he told Ars. "Having a limited schedule and no artist really forced us to concentrate on the game's core. I'm not sure if the game would have been as focused if we had more resources to create really lively visuals or add lots of extra gameplay features." The team is currently hard at work porting the game to the iPhone, a potentially dangerous combination for anyone who values their productivity.

Unsurprisingly, there are also a lot of truly novel ideas on display, such as Ulitsa Dimitrova: a fully hand-drawn game where you play as a chain-smoking young boy with a prostitute for a mom. The game repeats a seemingly endless cycle of violence and self-destruction until you stop moving the character, at which point he falls asleep and freezes to death.

There's also Paper Cakes, a puzzle/platform game that takes place on a virtual piece of paper, which allows you to interact with the world simply by folding the page. Then there's Puddle, a gorgeous, physics-based game that has you rotating the environment as you attempt to move the titular puddle from the beginning of a level to the end.

The devil is in the details

Possibly the most quirky idea presented was Devil's Tuning Fork. A first-person exploration game inspired by the concept of echolocation, Devil's Tuning Fork forces players to navigate its world using visual sound waves. And when coupled with the dark visuals and haunting soundtrack, it creates a unique and somewhat unsettling atmosphere.

The game took about six months to develop, from start to finish, by a team of 15, an unusually large size for a project like this. You can download and play the game now via the official website.

"With a team of this size, we had to overcome a couple of challenges in order to work as a cohesive unit," Jay Pecho, project and tech lead on the game, told Ars. "First, we needed to create a decision-making structure. One of the problems we faced early on was having 'too many cooks in the kitchen.' We wanted to get everyone's feedback and make everyone happy, but we quickly realized that more often than not, this was impossible. So we set up a forum so everyone could put in their two cents—but the final decision rested with the project lead.

"Each person had a particular skill set in a different disciplinary field and we were able to build on each other's strengths," he added. "Everybody brought something of their own to the table creatively as well, so this game is really an amalgam of the ideas of 15 individuals. We are very happy with the way it turned out."

As you would expect, the team was incredibly excited to learn they were chosen for the Student Showcase.

"Choose any word that is synonymous with 'thrilled' and that was our reaction," producer Matt Lazar told Ars. "Most of the team was on Skype when the announcement went up and proceeded to go nuts in our team chat. I was actually sleeping. When I woke up I had plenty of missed calls and messages from the team. So I knew something good must have happened."

And the rest of the list is just as interesting: Spectre features a unique approach to storytelling, allowing players to relive the memories of a 73-year-old man; Igneous is a fast-paced action game where you race your way out of an erupting volcano; and PuzzleBloom is a challenging puzzle game with a striking aesthetic, reminiscent of the most recent Prince of Persia game.

Overall it's an incredible line-up of games that makes us giddy with excitement to see what these young developers will come up with next. But for now the focus is on IGF, which will be taking place March 9-13 in San Francisco.

"Continuity is among some great games," Mikaelsson told Ars. We couldn't agree more.