Games Republic Showcase Competition Win

Text taken from the Games Republic website:

Game Republic Student Showcase 2010

The Game Republic Student Showcase 2010 was held on Tuesday 25th May 2010 at the University of Huddersfield. The Showcase was an amazing opportunity for final-year and postgraduate games course students from any higher education establishment in Yorkshire & Humber to showcase their work to the biggest developers in the region including Team17, Rockstar Leeds, Sumo Digital and Just Add Water.

Prizes are awarded for 1st, 2nd or 3rd place in four categories: the Game Design, Game Technology, Game Art and Best Team - the latter also providing a work placement for the winning team, which in 2009 resulted in placements at Rockstar Leeds for five University of Huddersfield graduates, with one graduate eventually given full-time employment.

What we won:

1st Prize Best Team Sponsored by Rockstar Leeds

1st Prize Game Design Sponsored by Team17

2nd Prize Game Technology Sponsored by SumoDigital

Winning the competition was a dream come true and I can't wait to begin the placement at Rockstar Leeds. I have some experience working within the games industry already after completing a summer placement in 2008. The amount you can learn is huge so I plan to make the most of this opportunity.

Crobot Wars - Games Republic Competition

My team are nearing the completion of a playable vertical slice of Crobot Wars. We finished university on the 7th of May and I have to say it was a resounding success (marks permitting).

We have been nominated for the Games Republic competition, which this year is held at the University of Huddersfield on May 25th.

I'll take some photos from the event and post them up once back. After spending the year cocooned in Leeds, it will be nice to see student work from other university's. Fingers crossed we can do well but it's a great opportunity to network either way.

From a personal point of view this competition spells the end of an era. The time has come to look for experience and further my abilities.

Here's some of my final artwork I produced for Crobot Wars.

Crobot Wars - Final Artwork Experimentation

The arena is really coming along and the majority of it is textured. After some tweaking, which I tend to do until the early hours, I'm happy with the overall look, which probably comes down to increasing the saturation and contrast of the textures.

After getting the majority of the texturing done I took a break and threw together a mock-up of some final artwork I plan to produce using the arena.

I'm happy with the results and once all the assets are completed, I will definitely complete a final version of this image complete with post production.

Crobot Wars - Texturing Progress

For my finals my team, Gazebo, are creating a 4 player arena based futuristic shooter using Microsoft's XNA development kit. It will be playable on both the Xbox 360 and the PC. Players will control a mechanical crab like vehicle with over the top weapons.....hence the game title: Crobot Wars. The aim is to produce a dual stick shooter that's both frantic and exciting, we have a time scale of 2 months......yes, 2 months!!

My role within the team is lead artist, therefore I'm producing the majority of the 3D content and artwork.

The image you see is my current progress with the 3D arena. The model itself is finished and I'd say the texturing is 70% completed. I tried to keep the polygon count as low as possible with the entire arena hitting the 13,000 polygon mark. To improve my skill and efficiency in Photoshop I planned to push the majority of the detail with some nice textures.

Sam