Search For A Star 2014 Winners Announced

By June 3, 2014 TIGA News

Search for a Star is a UK-based competition run by Aardvark Swift Recruitment in association with industry partners, designed to find, support and reward the most promising young video games programmers. The competition is open to all final-year university and masters students & is an excellent chance to shine the spotlight on both the students and the UK’s leading University courses, demonstrating to the games industry the talent, aptitude and employability of graduates.

Rising Star is a companion competition for non- final year students that replicates the main competition but judged as a separate group.

After 3 challenging rounds including over 230 entrants from 52 universities, the winners of the 2014 Search For A Star & Rising Star competitions have been decided: http://searchforastar.net/winners-2014/ 

Winner of Search For A Star 2014

Shane Jennings University of York

Winner of Rising Star 2014

Sam Parras University of Bristol

Both Shane and Sam have shown an outstanding aptitude for coding & exceptional talent through the stages of the competition. After much debate between the judges, both Shane and Sam were decided as the clear winners for each competition.

It was a hotly contested competition this year, with all finalists displaying excellent skills. We congratulate all those who made it to the final round of each competition for their amazing achievement.

The competition has a high level of support from leading studios including Microsoft, Exient, Boss Alien, Born Ready Games, Marmalade SDK & Mars On A Stick, from designing the assessments and providing the required software, through to judging each stage of the competition & sponsoring the prizes.

The competition is split into three diverse and challenging rounds, modelled directly on games industry practices to give all entrants experience of the process. This takes the form of an exam-style C++ Coding Test, a game development and publishing project with a one-week deadline, and a final panel interview where finalists were interviewed on their performance in the previous rounds, their portfolio and their plans for the future.

Each interviewer posed a different series of questions representing different specialisations and industry areas, requiring the finalists to answer based on a broad range of their existing knowledge and experiences during the competition.

We created the competition for several reasons. We want to get development studios, large and small, more aware and involved in the education process and see for themselves how the future of the industry is shaping up. We want universities to see the competition as a way of helping to assess the links between education and industry, giving direct feedback on how their courses are preparing students for games careers. Most of all, we want to highlight the UK’s best young games developers and encourage them to enhance their skills in a way that makes them more employable within the games industry.

The response from all sides has been phenomenal! Each year’s winner and finalists have gone on to immediately secure a job at a UK studio and last year the majority of those that made it through to the 2nd stage secured jobs upon graduation with UK developers.

We will updating http://www.SearchForAStar.net throughout the next week with information, videos and interviews from the winners, finalists, mentors and judges who were involved in this year’s competition.

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