Recent Uclan Games Design Graduates now in work!

Fantastic news!
So far in the space of a month since graduation lots of our recent graduates have already started work in the Games Industry!
Below are a few examples of their success.

Big congratulations to Saija Sipila has just started working as a junior artist at
Rebellion Video Games in Oxford.

Well done to Ben Parr who is working at TT Games.

and also Robin Demar,




plus Dec Troughton





and Ollie Hughes




and also Thomas Ip




In addition,
Congratulations to Jay Z Ashcroft for getting work at Sony Computer Entertainment




and to Steph Brookes who is also working at Sony Computer Entertainment





Then there's Samira Pritchard who's found work at ROQ IT

Well done Samira.




That's quite a list in such a short space of time!

Not only that but several other graduates are in the process of completing art tests and interviews and may be adding to this list very soon.

Good Luck Guys.
Keep in touch :)

 

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Much activity for Zero-K and some other news

Zero-K, the probably coolest fully FOSS offspring of the SpringRTS engine has seen at least two new releases since it last crossed my mind to check their page... a pity actually as the new features of version 1.1.7.0 (and prior) seem quite nice.
And for those not into the game (yet), there is now a channel with commented multi-player matches like this one:



Just a pity that the game-play doesn't really allow much zooming in to see the graphically really nice units ;)

In unrelated news:

• New release of Arx Libertatis (1.1.1)
• Tesseract is getting its own "base game" it seems
• There is a constant stream of new betas from Octaforge
• The Unvanquished summer tournament is under way, but matches so far have been a bit one-sided ;)
• Check out the new 3.8.0-beta1 version of MegaGlest

Hmm, there is probably much more... so please comment below :D

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DevCorner: Open (Game Art) Bundle

An interesting mixture to "pay what you want" and "ransom funding" has recently surfaced with the Open Bundle:



You can buy all the offered game art and use them under the CC-by license and if the total threshold is reached (10k, 1 day remaining, 9.3k already pledged) all the game art (2d sprites and music) will be officially released under the CC0. A split of the funds is btw. shared with the EFF and Creative Commons.

For those wondering: no, it is not done by our friends of OpenGameArt.org, but they think it is a good project anyways. Interestingly the creator is also thinking of expanding the idea:

Do you want to host your own "public domain ransom"?
I'd love to help you! Email me at nick@commonly.cc

P.S.: While we are on last day notices: Today ends the registration period for the Unvanquished summer tournament. Also check out their latest Alpha 17.

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Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, funded!

The self described open-source rogue-like survivalcraft / driving game in a sci-fi zombie apocalypse has successfully reached its goal on Kickstarter, and one of the developers will now be able to work on it full-time for a few months to implement for example a back-end for proper graphics.

But see and hear about it yourself:


The first stretch-goal is close too, with 12 days remaining to pledge money towards this cool project.

Less rosy does it look for the previously featured Data Dealer project. With only 48 hours to go, but still about 10k missing it will be a close finish if at all. They got some remarkable press lately though and jumped up about 10k in the last days, so it is still possible. So if you haven't done it yet, pledge here.

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Three more Games course Alumni Posters

Uclan Games Design course is really pleased to share three more of our Alumni posters.
Today we feature three more graduates who are enjoying work with successful companies,
Chris Kembry, OS Artist at 'Crytek' in Frankfurt,
Nik Hughes, Realtime Visualisation Specialist at 'Soluis Technologies'
and  Shaun Mooney, Concept Artist.

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Uclan Games Design Degree Show 2013

The Games Design Degree Show was officially opened on Friday 14th June and it was a very lively and busy evening.
There was a broad variety of student work on show and guests flooded in to see the artwork banners, play the board games, meet the challenges of the playable levels and enjoy the atmosphere.There was a conglomeration of music, laughter and discussion across our large games studio where the show was held.
Once again , it was so obvious that there's a real community spirit in the Uclan games course, it's a great big family, where students share ideas and skills and enjoy playing and working together in a large community.

To make the night even more of a success, our games student,  
Andrea Wastlund was selected out of many contenders to receive the  
Creative Festival Design Award and was presented with an engraved glass trophy by Vice Chancellor, Dr. Malcolm McVicar for her achievement. 
This is the second year in a row that we have won this award for games design!

For those who were unable to visit the shows during the Creative Festival week,
below are examples of student banners from the private view of the Games Design Show 2013. These were exhibited alongside books, pitch documents, 3d prints and a medley of digital work displayed on screen.

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