Game students sent on a dare

Ballyfermot college will be entering three teams to this year’s international student games making competition, Dare to be Digital.

The first stage of the competition will be an interview day in the Digital Hub in Dublin’s Liberties on May 8, followed by ten weeks of incubation heats at Trinity College aimed at helping students create prototypes of their game ideas.

Dare to be Digital was started by the University of Abertay Dundee as an internal project and quickly expanded into an international competition, this year it includes teams from China and India.
This is the first year of incubation centres away from Dundee – the Trinity centre is to support students from both the Republic and the North.

Shane Whelan, the coordinator of the games design course in BCFE, is looking forward to the upcoming tournament. He avoided making any predictions after getting it wrong the last couple of years. 
“Every year I have been terrible at predicting which one the judges will choose but I think we will succeed. One year they want something more conventional and the following year they want something less conventional,” said Whelan. 

Arch Angel Studios, Cybermyth Games, and Solas are the names of the three teams participating in this year's competition. Their games ideas vary from a ten-year-old girl in an Irish town in the nineteenth century to being an investigative journalist who has to take photographs.

All of the entrees from Ballyfermot are in their second year of their Higher National Diploma in Games Design. Although a couple of the teams have linked up with fellow students from Carlow IT.

The three teams have a grueling schedule ahead to get to the ten-week final in the summer. First they have to present their idea to the judges and if chosen have to create their idea for the heats. Whelan believes the project has to have a mix of everything and that the design cannot only be a bright idea.

"The judges are looking for a vertical slice of a finished project, an idea that has a bit of everything. They have a focus on marketing, you have not got a free reign of creativity it has to be a marketable product" stated the BCFE tutor.

Whelan believes that it would be wasted opportunity not to enter the annual competition – if teams advance to the ten week long programme they will be working with some of the biggest names in the games industry.

Dare to be Digital will be selecting six teams from the island of Ireland to proceed in the competition.
These six teams will take part in a mentoring and support program in Dublin during which they will build their prototype game.

Support will be provided by Irish and UK games companies. At the end of the support programme, they will then travel to the University of Abertay for the grand final.

He added: “The competition is getting bigger and bigger every year. We would be mad not to enter it, winning the grand prize is fantastic and it's almost a guarantee of a job in the industry”

“Just getting to the ten weeks means you are working in a pressure cooker environment with heavyweight industry mentors.”

- Chris Blake