We’re a big chunk of the way into Search For A Star 2019, so here’s a wrap up of some of the stats for this years challenges!

First off though, a massive thank you to all of the partners, patrons and supporters who have been acting as assessors this year. We’ll post a fully credited list in the coming weeks as we move into the Stage 2 assessment, but a special shout-out to our partners at Sumo Digital, TT Odyssey, Boss Alien & First Touch Games for their help with the Stage 1 art reviews.

Entry Data

We made our Get In The Game careers tour more focused in 2018, visiting 25 key universities instead of our usual 60+. While this was always going to have an effect on total signups for Search For A Star, we’ve still had a huge 650 students signed up to take part in the games development challenges across games programming, 3D art, animation and VFX!

400 games students submitted work for the first stage of the challenge, either by providing a portfolio piece for review or taking a programming test to showcase their skills. Over half of the Stage 1 submissions were for the games programming challenge, with students testing their knowledge on a high level C++ programming assessment designed by our studio partners. The test represents the level of knowledge and ability that studios expect to see in graduate programmers, so the difficulty can be a real shock to many of those who take part.

120 students have submitted games projects for Stage 2, dedicating a few weeks to develop full games prototypes, game-ready characters and environments, and vfx and animation sequences. These are all currently being assessed, so we’ll be talking about them in more detail and sharing the projects with you shortly.

Leading games universities

Sheffield Hallam University have once again topped the entries list, with 62 students registering to take part in the game development challenges! As ever, the universities that put the most students forward all have a strong history of high attainment not just with Search For A Star, but for getting their students into the games industry in general. These are undoubtedly some of the best universities for games around.

For 2019 we’ve had entries from students at 87 different universities across the UK & Europe, so how do those university signups stack up against each other? Let’s have a look at Search For A Star 2019’s university stats…

Top 10 Games University Registrations
Search For A Star & Sumo Digital Rising Star 2019

University	Student Registrations
Sheffield Hallam University	62
Staffordshire University	54
University of Huddersfield	47
University of Central Lancashire (UCLAN)	46
Howest DAE	44
Abertay University	35
Teesside University	34
University of Hertfordshire	33
University of Derby	23
Breda University of Applied Sciences	22

With so many universities involved, don’t worry if yours is missing from the Top 10. We’ve also had loads of students enter from Derby, Breda, Solent, Bournemouth, Goldsmiths and many more! With the quality of work coming in we fully expect to see plenty of universities represented at our finals day event in April!

Games jobs from Search For A Star 2018

What can you achieve from taking part?

In 2018 all of our Search For A Star winners graduated into studio roles, with several taking on jobs with our partner studios;

Sumo Digital

Joe Bamber (Environment Art Winner)
Shannon Symonds (Character Art Winner)
Kial Oliver-Gibson (Rising Star Character Art Winner)
Callum Batty (Games Animation Finalist)

Rebellion

Adelaide Coldham (Games Animation Winner)

Frontier Developments

Robert Arnold (Games Programming Winner)

Cloud Imperium

Jacob Beckley (Games VFX Winner)

In total, we’ve directly placed 30 people into studio roles through Search For A Star & Grads In Games over the past year, and helped over 50 more graduate straight into the games industry.

Search for a Star is consistently proving a great way for students to really challenge their skills and bring themselves to the attention of studios around the UK. In addition to the studios above, we’ve also helped students into roles at TT Games, d3t, Red Kite Games, Firesprite, TickTock Games, Guerrilla Games, Deep Silver Dambuster & other leading games studios.

If you weren’t able to take part in Search For A Star but would still like to find out more information on graduate careers options in the games industry, you can learn more about CVs & portfolios for games here on our site, or contact our specialist games recruiters Rosey & Warren.