This year we’ve had big achievements for several of the best games universities, with many very familiar names across the board!

The Search For A Star and Rising Star challenges are set and assessed by the games industry, with the aim of helping university and college students to produce a high quality portfolio project and increase their visibility to games studios. The project briefs are modelled directly on the type of work that games studios want to see from graduate game developers looking for their first jobs out of university. We break our university achievements down based on the following student attainment levels in the challenges:

Category winner : the ultimate winner of their respective challenge category, as decided by our industry interview panels.

Finalist : The students who scored the highest with their challenge projects, as decided by our project assessors.

One To Watch : Students who scored very highly with their challenge projects and show good potential, but didn’t quite make it to the finals.

There are some excellent achievements here, particularly for universities like Middlesex University and Futureworks, who have a much smaller intake on games courses than many of the others on the list.

Well done to the highest achieving universities this year, each with a strong mix of student finalists, winners and ones to watch:

Middlesex University: 4 Finalists, including 1 category winner, and also 5 Ones To Watch
University of Hertfordshire: 4 Finalists, 2 category winners, 2 Ones To Watch
Abertay University: 4 Finalists, 2 category winners, 2 Ones To Watch
University of South Wales: 4 Finalists, 1 category winner, 2 Ones To Watch
Futureworks: 3 Finalists, 2 category winners, 1 One To Watch
University for the Creative Arts: 3 Finalists, 1 category winner, 3 Ones To Watch

Also very notable achievements for the following, who only had a handful of signups and still made it to the top spots!

Brunel University London: 1 Finalist & category winner
Breda University of Applied Sciences: 1 Finalist & category winner, 1 One To Watch
AP Hogeschool: 1 Finalist & category winner
The Developer Academy: 1 Finalist

Although they didn’t have any winners in this year’s Search For A Star or Rising Star challenges, we still saw some very impressive achievement levels from games courses at some of our other regular university participants.
University of Huddersfield: 1 Finalist and 7 Ones To Watch,
Falmouth University: 5 Finalists, 4 Ones To Watch
Howest DAE: 4 Finalists, 1 One To Watch
Escape Studios: 2 Finalists, 1 One To Watch
Staffordshire University: 2 Finalists, 1 One To Watch
Teesside University: 2 Finalists, 1 One To Watch
Solent University: 2 Finalists

Congratulations also to all the universities who had a student make it to the finals : Anglia Ruskin University, Coventry University, Futuregames, Glasgow Caledonian University, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Liverpool John Moores University, Manchester Metropolitan University, Ravensbourne University, Sheffield Hallam University, University of Oxford, University of the West of England

We’d like to extend a massive thanks to all the industry assessors, judges and our partner studios at Aardvark Swift, d3t and Coconut Lizard, Red Kite Games, 10:10 Games, Furious Bee, PlusMusic and Steel City Interactive. We’d also like to thank our supporters at XR Games, the National Videogame Museum and Sheffield Hallam University, and our prize providers Adobe and Escape Technology.

Our development teams have been invaluable in the process, and we thank our programming challenge developer Lizi Attwood of Furious Bee, and our Design challenge developer 10:10 Games.