Our tenth anniversary Search For A Star & Sumo Digital Rising Star have come to a close, and the 2020 winners have been revealed!

It’s been another excellent year for Search For A Star and we’re proud of everyone who reached our 2020 final interviews. The level of quality across all the categories this year has created some very tough decisions for our judges, and presented us with another fantastic selection of finalists!

We created the student game development challenges as a way to highlight to games studios some of the exceptionally talented students across the UK and Europe, and that’s certainly been the case this year! Over the past ten years, we’ve helped change the way that games studios view people coming out of university and create a more positive attitude towards graduate programmers, artists, animators and VFX artists. Increasingly, studios are welcoming the fresh perspectives, abilities and enthusiasm that graduates can bring.

We hope that by continuing to encourage communication between universities and the games industry, and by providing Search For A Star as a platform for students to show their skills, that we can keep improving links and keep the games industry growing!

Thank you to all of the assessors who have helped everyone get to this stage. Their experience and expertise throughout Stage 1 & 2 of the challenges has been invaluable in providing feedback and highlighting those with the potential to get through to the final stage. We’d also like to give a massive thanks to the Grads In Games partners and supporters who have made all of this possible. Their support and belief in the initiative, across both the Search For A Star game dev challenges and our Get In The Game student careers events, has really shown the importance of running activities like this. Huge thanks to Sumo Digital, nDreams, Boss Alien, NaturalMotion, TT Odyssey, d3t, Red Kite Games, Kwalee, Furious Bee, Firesprite & Guerrilla Games.

Our Search For A Star (final year and masters students) & Sumo Digital Rising Star (students not yet in final year) winners for 2020:

Sumo Digital Rising Star 2020
The Winners

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Environment Art

Dominic Brookes
De Montfort University

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Character Art

Radomír Fifik
Teesside University

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Games VFX

Elie Van Ravels
Howest Digital Arts & Entertainment

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Games Programming

Justyna Kwiatkowska
University of Central Lancashire

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Search For A Star 2020
The Winners

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Environment Art

Milan De Laet
Howest Digital Arts & Entertainment

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Character Art

Emily Harrison
Teesside University

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Games Animation

Chris Woods
SAE Institute (UK)

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Games VFX

Reece Kuby
University of Huddersfield

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Games Programming

Matthew Lowe
University of Central Lancashire

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A very well-deserved congratulations to everyone!

Thank you once again to everyone who took part in the Search For A Star process throughout the year, including all of our finalists, our final stage judges, project assessors and industry partners – you make the day what it is & we couldn’t do it without you!