Breaking the signup record once again with 1480 students from 144 universities and colleges taking part, this year’s Search for A Star & Rising Star game development challenges have been one of the largest we’ve ever seen!

Each challenge tasks students with completing a game project to an industry brief, either in games programming, game design, environment art, character art, animation or VFX. Projects are reviewed by our team of industry assessors, with the highest scoring being selected as finalists.

On Thursday, these finalists joined us at Sheffield Hallam University to face interview panels of industry professionals from leading games studios, including d3t, Red Kite Games, 10:10 Games, Furious Bee, Airship Interactive, Rocksteady Studios, Sumo Digital, Secret Mode, Fuse Games, CCP, Cloud Imperium, Awe Interactive, IMPRNT, Wushu Studios, Mythica, Expression Games, Steel City Interactive, Ground Shatter Games, and Lucid Games. Our interview judges spoke to our finalists about their game development skills as well as their career aspirations, before deciding on this year’s Search For A Star and Rising Star winners.

With the results revealed during our presentation event at Sheffield’s National Videogame Museum, we’re very happy to confirm all of this year’s category winners across both Search For A Star & Rising Star.

We’ll be talking in more detail over the next couple of weeks about all of our winners, their work and what our judges had to say during their interviews!

Congratulations to all of this year’s winners!

Games Animation Winners

Games VFX Winners

Game Design Winners

Character Art Winners

Environment Art

Games Programming

Congratulations to everyone who took part in this year’s challenges, and a huge thanks to all of our studio partners below for their support across all of our activities this year!