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Epic Games and a panel of judges have selected the finalists for this years Make Something Unreal Live European student development contest.
Four teams have been picked from a shortlist of 12, all of whom recently presented their works in progress to a panel made up of Jo Twist, CEO of UKIE, Stephen Gaffney, CEO of Fireteam, Tim Edwards, editor of PCGamesN, and senior personnel from Epic Games and the W vast UK science charity and research body The Wellcome Trust, which is supporting the contest.
The selected finalists are as follows:
– Dead Shark Triplepunch of Blekinge Institute of Technology, developing Loch Ness
– Kairos Games of Staffordshire University, developing Polymorph
– Static Games of Bournemouth University, developing Mendel’s Farm
– Team Summit of University of Abertay Dundee, developing Beings
The teams are crafting games built around the theme ‘Mendelian Inheritance: genetics and genomics’, and now have four months to work on their games using Epic’s UDK, the free version of Unreal Engine 3. The teams are also being supported by tool outfit Allegorithmic, which is providing full licences of its Substance Designer texturing solution for all finalists.
“We were hugely impressed by the quality of all 12 shortlisted entries to this year’s competition,” said Mike Gamble, European territory manager at Epic Games and a member of the contest’sjudging panel. “We have some real talent among the teams and it was a difficult decision to pick just four from the original 12 games.”
“Interestingly, all four finalists tackled different characteristics of the theme, cleverly representing important, and often misunderstood, aspects of Mendelian Inheritance," added Dr. Darren Logan of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and a member of the MSUL judging panel. "The constraints of the theme have challenged the teams to think more creatively and they have demonstrated the potential to really enhance the game through the science itself. ”
The contest’s deadline coincides with consumer expo The Gadget Show Live, where finalists will work on their games live on the show floor in front of the MSUL judges and the public visitors to the show.
On the final day of the event the winners will be declared, and awarded a commercial Unreal Engine 4 license for PC.
