Our chums over at Edge have started throwing an annual 'Get Into Games' compo/game jam, which this year rewards the creator of the winning entry with a Unity Pro license, plus a trip to Unite—Unity’s annual development conference in Boston—and a trip to Abertay University’s Dare ProtoPlay festival in Dundee. The winner has just been announced, as have the two runners-up, whose developers will also receive Unity Pro licenses. You can play all three games right now.
The winning developer, as announced on GamesRadar here, is Jon Caplin, creator of jaggedly atmospheric first-person adventure Icarus.1. It's set on an abandoned spaceship, and I'm sure absolutely nothing is going to go wrong the moment you set foot in it. The three judges on the panel were unanimous with their praise for the System Shocky Icarus.1, and it does look pretty nifty—you can download it here. (Or here if you want a Mac version.)
The two runners-up: ball-based arena brawler Sphere 50, by Carlos Fernandez de Tejada Quemada and Guillermo Cle (grab that here), and Penny Pursuit by Glyph Games (here's the link for that). The former is a "fun little multiplayer game that interprets the brief in a unique way,” according to judge (and Unity Technologies founder) David Helgason, while Abertay lecturer Dr. Dayna Galloway reckons the latter is a "strong example of design processes that fuse together two mechanics or genres to establish a concept". It's also a game where you play as a treasure chest trying to outrun a greedy dragon. Here's an image of what that looks like:
