This forum's going to be active for the next couple of months while the challenges are open, but will still be around even after submissions close. Based on current registration numbers there could end up being quite a lot of people in here, so we'll get some intros going.

Games is a huge industry but the dev community itself can feel surprisingly small. Between networking events, conferences, meetups and just moving around between studios, you'll probably meet up with a lot of the same people across different areas in the industry. Making new friends and contacts is a great skill to have within games that can reward you again and again over time.

The people in here are from universities across the UK and Europe, all studying and working in similar areas. You're all part of the same generation of the games industry & many of you are going to be bumping into each other in your future careers. Knowing other people in the industry can be really helpful, so why not start now?

Some simple intros to begin - who are you, where are you from & what made you decide to get into game dev?

So, I'll start..

I'm Dan, I'm your main support contact for Search For A Star & you'll usually only see me as the voice behind the Grads In Games account. I've been doing marketing with Grads In Games & Search For A Star for nearly 4 years, doing a lot of the behind-the-scenes work for the challenges. If you come along to the showcase event in April, I'll probably be the one making sure everything's in the right place & calming down nervous finalists.

I don't really do game dev aside from sometimes messing with Unity or Gamemaker, most of my creative work is in weird audio & sound design. Luckily, I (and by proxy, you) have access to a network of hundreds of professional game devs to help out with SFAS.

I try to be as helpful as possible, so if you need anything you can either get me on the support forum, email me at dan@gradsingames.com or find me on Twitter.

Hello everyone! I am Mikel from Spain and this is my first year at the UK, I was able to make it to sheffield hallam university thanks to an agreement with my spanish university to allow us to do a top up, so here I am doing the last year of Computer Science for games.

I have been working with unity and unreal last year,  but now I am more focused on getting some knowledge with graphics apis, so it is a good opportunity to catch up with unity again!

Good luck to everyone and have fun!! :D

I guess I'll also join in, as I've finally gotten around to starting on the project.

My name is Daan, I'm in my final year of Digital Arts and Entertainment at Howest in Belgium, my home country. I'm mostly a programmer and have recently been getting a lot more experience in C# due to Unity while I originally started out with C++. Obviously i'm a programmer, but I like dabbling with design principles  and the idea of becoming a technical designer.

Also, I'm a big procrastinator which has been the bane of my existence and doesn't help in personal projects at all.

May as well contribute:

My name is Matthew, I'm a student studying computer games development at Liverpool John Moores University. I spend more time analysing games and watching other people play them than actually playing them myself. I've dabbled in various hobby projects over the years and gained a bounty of skills as a result. I'm a big fan of programming in my spare time, particularly in C# with Unity as the development environment to help further my understanding of game development concepts.