A talented team of students from the University of Abertay Dundee will this week take part in the finals of Make Something Unreal Live at the Gadget Show Live.
Make Something Unreal Live is an international game development competition open to all students enrolled full-time at any European higher education establishment.
The Abertay finalists are Claudio Bozzotta, Vijay Kesiraju, Clement Marcou and Gaurav Pant, who are competing as Team Summit.
Team Summit’s game, Beings, is a colourful puzzle platformer based on the laws of genetics. The students designed the game to be suitable for children from the age of three, but challenging enough to appeal to older players as well.
Team Summit member Gaurav Pant said: “To reach the finals of Make Something Unreal Live is amazing. The team worked so hard to create a fun game about the laws of genetics, something that would appeal to children but also be an educational tool in disguise.
“We’re all really looking forward to demonstrating Beings at the Gadget Show Live twice a day, as we keep building and refining the game. It’ll be great to show our work to so many members of the public.
“The aim is to win the competition, then hopefully set up our own business so we can complete and release Beings. There’s definitely a market for fun, enjoyable games that are also educational, and we think our game could be a real success.”
Dr Iain Donald from Abertay University said: “Team Summit are a very talented group of students, and they’ve done exceptionally well to beat all the other entries to make it to the live finals in Birmingham.
“At Abertay we’re really keen for our students to apply the skills they learn to create games that are artistic and educational, as well as being entertaining. Computer games is such a rich creative field and it’s a delight to see students embracing this right at the start of their careers.”
In Beings the player plays the role of various cute creatures, on the pursuit to reach a peaceful, promised land. They have to find a suitable partner, mate, and inherit the characteristics and abilities of their parents to overcome obstacles such as fire, high cliffs and poisonous plants.
More than 170 students across 22 teams submitted game pitches that play on the theme of ‘Mendelian inheritance: genetics and genomics’, spanning concepts such as variation, mutation and other behaviours of the human genome.
Make Something Unreal Live is taking part at the Gadget Show Live in the NEC Birmingham from today until Sunday 7 April.
The Gadget Show attracts around 2 million viewers per programme on Channel 5, and the Gadget Show Live is the UK’s biggest consumer electronics event.
The competition is in partnership with the Wellcome Trust, the charitable foundation that supports research and innovation in biomedical research and the medical humanities.