Games Academy on a hot streak as student team wins funding from Tranzfuser for third year running

Falmouth student gaming team Meteorite Media have received development funding from industry leading body Tranzfuser for their game Kaya’s Vale.

Tranzfuser is one of the most hotly contested student games programmes in the UK. It provides a pathway to employment for new UK games graduates, taking teams’ games from concept and prototyping through to publication.

The programme supports game development for some of the most talented students in the country. Incredibly, it’s the third year in a row that a team from the Falmouth Games Academy have been successful in the competition.

This year’s winning game, Kaya’s Vale, is a 3D third person adventure which revolves around Kaya and her dinosaur companion Apollo, as they make their way through a world where humans and dinosaurs coexist.  

MA Game Design student Matt Stevens - the Studio Lead and Level Designer for the project - has loved dinosaurs from a young age, and was itching to put his passion into game form.

“I’d been waiting for an excuse to work on a dinosaur game since I started making them, and thankfully I was able to find some like-minded individuals who wanted to join me!”, Matt told us.

“I was really inspired by Dinotopia, an amazing book series by famous painter James Gurney about humans and dinosaurs living together on an island. It’s got beautifully painted art, an interesting narrative and feels so real despite being fiction.

“As a kid I thought it was a real place and it made me wish I had my own pet dinosaur – so I’m glad we’ve started making a game that makes that possible!”

The game couldn’t be more different to last year’s winning team, who received funding for their post-apocalyptic thriller Rustbreaker.

According to Kimberly Pitcher - Art Director and 2D UI and Concept Artist for Kaya’s Vale – games that heighten feelings of empathy in their users could be an emerging trend in the industry.

“There is a rise in games that are almost like interactive –movies, and players increasingly want to be able to lose themselves within a well-told story - this has only been accelerated due to the current global climate.”

The team will be hoping to use their funding to build on the momentum generated by their Tranzfuser success. According to Matt, their funding will be going towards "experimenting more with Kaya’s Vales mechanics and gameplay, while allowing us to push towards a ‘vertical slice’."

As Matt told us, “Once we have a refined, polished slice (a portion of the game which acts as proof of concept), we can pitch to publishers for further funding – watch this space!”

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