Five Falmouth students made the Grads in Games Search for a Star and Rising Star finals
16 April 2024
Falmouth University Games Academy students Brandon Chadwick, Faith Hamil, Samual Wood, Robert Turner and James Percival all made the finals for the 2024 Grads in Games Rising Star and Search for a Star challenges.
Grads in Games is an award-winning outreach initiative founded by leading games industry recruiters Aardvark Swift in 2014. Through its programme of events, activities and resources, it aims to help more graduates make the leap from student to games industry professional.
The Grads in Games Rising Star (for final year students) and Search for a Star (for student not yet in their final year of study) challenges are designed alongside leading studios and game developers. Programming, design, 3D art, animation and VFX students across the UK and Europe are invited to show their skills and build their portfolio, creating technical game projects and polished game-ready assets.
As finalists, Falmouth students Brandon Chadwick, Faith Hamil, Samual Wood, Robert Turner and James Percival had the opportunity to receive feedback from games professionals as they took part in interviews with industry leaders at the annual Finals Day and student conference.
Announcing the finalists, Grads in Games wrote: “These students have shown high level skills and created exceptional projects over the course of a few weeks, across programming, art, design, animation and VFX. Many of the students in this list will undoubtedly become future stars of the games industry and we’re eager to help them on that journey.”
Explore finalists’ work
Search for a Star
Brendon Chadwick, Game Animation BA(Hons) student
Category: Game Animation
With inspirations from Nier and Fire Emblem, Brendon created a fully game-ready set of character animations with a strong technical approach.
The assessors awarded Brendon great scores overall, with the joint highest score in the technical/workflow criteria for showing excellent potential across a range of technical animation skills.
Faith Hamill, Game Art BA(Hons) student
Category: Game VFX
Static Shock
Faith’s ranged lighting attack merges into an electrical control AoE effect, incorporating multiple elements with a lot of good consideration around purpose and game use.
Assessors were impressed by the planning and research that went into the project, creating a great foundation upon which to develop a strong vfx sequence.
James Percival, Game Development BA(Hons) student
Category: Game Design
CaRPG
CaRPG is a combination of JRPGs and Racing, where when you collide with an enemy racer time freezes and you must perform a turn-based battle against them.
Rising Star
Samuel Wood, Game Art BA(Hons) student
Category: Character Art
Arlecchino
Samuel’s vibrant and theatrical project inspired by Commedia dell’Arte shows a great level of characterisation and dynamism, very much fitting with the character’s role as a court jester.
Samuel scored highly across all criteria, complimenting the attention to detail and technical achievements.
Robert Turner, Game Development: Design BA(Hons) student
Category: Game Design
SpectraStrike
Spectrastrike is a top-down shooter with puzzle elements where the player controls two characters, switching between them by killing enemies.
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