Ukie Student Game Jam 2024 kicked off this morning!
The Ukie Student Game Jam is a fun and creative opportunity for our student members to flex their game-making muscles. Kicking off this morning at 9am, we’ve challenged over 175 students across 45 teams to create a new video game by 5pm tomorrow, Friday 15 March. In partnership with Playground Games, we’ve set them the theme of INTEGRITY.
All participants are members of Ukie Students, our year-round programme for students on video games courses at colleges and universities across the UK. Each team of up to six students has been paired with their very own industry mentor to guide and support them through the Game Jam. This year’s mentors are developers from UK video games studios including Playground Games, Sports Interactive, Jagex, nDreams and Frontier Developments, to name a few. Many of our mentors joined this activity through our brilliant Video Games Ambassadors programme, run by Into Games.
The Ukie Student Game Jam is fully remote, so jammers will be working in computer labs far and wide. They’re staying connected in a private Discord server, which has fast become a feel-good community of over 220 students, faculty and industry professionals socialising, learning from each other and, of course, sharing photos of their pets. Students have begun branding their teams, with some charming and unique names such as Team n Biscuits, BearDucks, Dead Weight, the lonesome cowboy 🤠, Soup Software, and even 👋🫵🤘🤜🤟🤞 (pronounced ‘Hand Signal Heroes’).
The winning team will receive a selection of fantastic prizes, kindly provided by our Game Jam partners. Students will get the incredible opportunity to showcase their winning demo at video games expo WASD in London, 25-27 April. An awards presentation will also take place on the Careers Stage at WASD at 3pm on Thursday 25 April. The winners will also get 1 year of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, with thanks to Xbox, and an Elgato Stream Deck +, with thanks to Scan Computers.
The Ukie team will play through the submitted demos and decide on a shortlist of games to be to put to the test by our panel of industry judges:
Vince Finlayson and Jana Stadeler from Playground Games
David Lilley from Roucan (the team behind WASD)
Rose Tan from Into Games
James Butcher from Epic Games
Siân Mayhall-Purvis and Yiren Ye from Ukie
We can’t wait to see what our talented student participants come up with. We’re wishing the best of luck and happy game jamming to everyone taking part!
The Ukie Student Game Jam 2024 is proud to be in partnership with Playground Games, WASD, Xbox, Scan Computers and Into Games, and Ukie Students partners Epic Games and Tranzfuser.