With the second round of this year’s Search For A Star competition now closed, we’re giving you a video preview of some of this year’s games projects from both the Search For A Star & the Rising Star competitions. We’ve been massively impressed with a lot of the competition entries this year & wanted to share some of them with you as an example of what our students have been able to achieve.

For 2014, all participants in round 2 were given one week to bugfix, improve, develop and publish games from a basic engine framework supplied by Marmalade, which had been deliberately littered with bugs and non-compiling code. This year’s engine framework was based around a simple grid structure and some basic shape assets.

33 entrants across both strands of the contest have now sent their finished technical projects to our team of industry judges, where they will be thoroughly tested and assessed before the finalists are decided next Monday.

Judging will be performed by an expert games development team including representatives from Exient, Boss Alien, Born Ready Games, and the games themselves will be published onto Microsoft Windows Phone Store.

To show off the level of games development skills on display in this year’s competition & to demonstrate the ways in which the students and graduates took to the challenge, we’ve put together a demo reel of gameplay videos from some of the games developers taking part in the second round;

Gameplay videos included:

“Muddle” by Fraser Tomison of Abertay University

“Star Searchers” by Carl Jones of Sheffield Hallam University (Rising Star)

“Marple Match” by Shane Jennings of The University of York

“Alien Heads” by Sam Parras of The University of Bristol (Rising Star)

“Rising Star” by Diede Apers of Howest, Belgium (Rising Star)

“Gemolution” by Milcho Milchev of The University of Hull (Rising Star)

Head back tomorrow to try out some of the games for yourself!
We’ll be giving you free downloads of games developed in round 2.