At the conference WN Istanbul’24, which concluded last week, the traditional competition for the best game development took place. Read on to find out who won in our publication.
Let us remind you that at every WN, a competition for the best game of the event is held as part of the developer exhibition. The pool of the best projects is curated by the service Game Finder, and the winners are chosen by an expert jury. This time, the jury included:
- Gareth Brown — Lead Technical Artist at Playstudios;
- Nick Phipps — Lead Game Designer at Ubisoft Abu Dhabi;
- Austin Malcolm — Senior Brand Manager at Saber Interactive;
- Justin Burnham — Managing Director at 3D Realms;
- Tiziano Giardini — Program Director at Quickload;
- Elena Morina — Founder and CEO of Ravenage.
The winners were determined within four categories. Let's take a closer look.
In the Best Game Design category, the winner was the pixel life simulator To Pixelia (Pixeduo Studios, Turkey). In this game, players can engage in gardening like in Stardew Valley, be a criminal and drive cars like in the first two GTA games, as well as beg or become president.
The Best Art award went to Project ST (The Breach Studios, Spain). This is a PvPvE third-person shooter with a cartoon style. Key features include the ability to control and fight with giant robots.
The Best Storytelling award was given to the adventure game Leila (Ubik Studios, Turkey). The game tells the story of an "ordinary woman" trying to make sense of her life. Besides hand-drawn graphics, the project stands out with a large number of puzzles and mini-games.
As for the main category, the grand prize was awarded to To Pixelia.
The sponsor of this competition was the mobile game and app developer JustMoby. Their key project, Raft Survival: Ocean Nomad, boasts an audience of over 100 million people.