Devil’s Tuning Fork: Not only beautiful, but also innovative.

The student winners of the IGF 2010 student competition were announced. As you can imagine, there are high quality works among them, some have really innvative things to show.

My interest went to the game “Devils Tuning Fork“. It’s basically a game in the style of a “first person shooter”, but the interesting detail is provided by the texturing. The game is inspired by works of M.C. Escher and the echo-sounder / echo-location communication (like dolphings and bats do). You strife through blackness, until an “sound-event” is taking place. From there a lightwave is illuminating the scene. One of your tools is a “tuning fork”, that dispatches sound waves. The goal of this game was to “explore a new mode of perception through sound visualization.” Like if you were playing with your ears.

The game was made in about six months by a bigger team. The result looks cool, polished and that new visual perception really scores! They also had some kind of storyline, not too original, but also something “above the line”:

As a mysterious epidemic causes children everywhere to fall into comas, one child wakes up in an alternate reality. It is up to this child, the player, to determine the cause of the epidemic and save the other children trapped here. By way of the devil’s tuning fork, a magical instrument that allows the player to perceive sound waves, the player must find all the children and successfully escape this alternate reality, thereby waking up from the coma.

Update:
I found just another cool making-of: