Congratulations to Robbe Mahieu from Howest DAE, our winner in the Games Programming category in Rising Star 2023!

Our Rising Star challenges work the same as Search For A Star, though are for students who are not yet in their final year of university or are at a college level. Games Programming has always been a core part of the what we do so it was excellent to see over 220 students sign up to take part this year across the two tiers. This year’s challenge was a C++ only challenge, with students given a small prototype UE5 game project developed by our partner Lizi Attwood at Furious Bee. Each student had 4 weeks to develop this prototype into a fully-featured game and publish it as a finished project.

Using just a week of the available time, Robbe adapted the small object detection project into a playable 3D game prototype (you can check out Luke’s project video below). At the final interview, Robbe’s C++ knowledge, technical understanding and overall confidence made it clear to the judges that he had earned the winners title!

“I entered this competition just for fun and never thought I’d become a finalist let alone win the thing! This is actually the first time I’ve won any sort of competition and it being game dev related, something I’m really passionate about, it just means a lot to me. Winning is very awesome, but the fun part is actually participating and creating the project, and just that alone was worth it!”

This year’s Search For A Star Games Programming challenges were created by Lizi Attwood as a way of helping games programming students to create and publish a portfolio project that showed exactly the type of skills that studios want to see from programming graduates starting a games career. Thank you also to our judging panel for the Rising Star Games Programming challenge, John Green from Codemasters, Yann Richeaux from Red Kite Games and Paul Walker from Aardvark Swift.

After Robbe’s interview, the judges shared with us the reasons behind their decision:

“Robbe showed a good knowledge of C++, working at a level that exceeds what would be expected of an individual at their experience level. He was able to thoroughly explain the what, why and hows of their project along with techniques that are usually gained after gaining industry experience.”

Congratulations once again to Robbe, and we look forward to seeing a whole lot more from them in future 💚