The organizers of the 2007 Independent Games Festival have announced the four winners of individual categories in the IGF Modding Competition, each of whom will now compete at GDC 2007 for the overall IGF Best Mod award.
Best Singleplayer FPS Mod has been awarded to Cut Corner Company Productions' Weekday Warrior mod for Half-Life 2 (Gamasutra interview). The student collective at the Guildhall at SMU produced a total conversion mod made in the vein of the old-school adventure games, set inside a modern corporate office environment, which includes physics-based mini-games such as office golf, darts, and trashcan basketball.
Best RPG Mod has been awarded to Ossian Studios' Darkness Over Daggerford mod for Neverwinter Nights. Set in the Forgotten Realms, and produced by former BioWare producer Alan Miranda, Darkness over Daggerford gives players a 25-30-hour RPG with a strong Baldur's Gate feel, including a new world map and extensive involvement from some of the top NWN game modders.
Best Multiplayer FPS Mod has been awarded to ES Team's Eternal Silence mod for Half-Life 2 (Gamasutra interview), which is an impressive sci-fi space combat/FPS hybrid that "pits two capital ships against each other in a seamless blend" of the two modes, and includes a battlefield as large as 32768 cubic kilometres.
Best Other Mod has been awarded to Ludocraft's Spawn Of Deflebub, a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 that mixes elements from dodgeball, pinball, billiards and Break-Out in a lunatic H.P. Lovecraft-inspired futuristic story setting, with impressive retro-psychedelic graphics. This esoteric mod has been constructed by the creators of last year's IGF Modding finalist Dragonfly Variations.
The four winners of the IGF Modding categories each get a $500 travel stipend to help them travel to Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this March, where they will show their mod as part of the IGF Pavilion. In addition, one of the four mods will be crowned as overall Best Mod at the Independent Games Festival Awards during GDC, receiving a cash prize of $5,000.
