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,

My name is Tudor and I am a student from the university of Essex.

Like most other people here, I always loved playing video games which lead me to study programming. Luckily I actually liked it and became pretty good at it. So here I am studying game programming at my university and working on many side projects. I am currently on a placement year so I am relatively busy, but working on a quick mini-game is a lot of fun either way.

I've been programming for around 4 years now but only have been working on games (with Unity) for about 2 years.

If you want to check out the stuff I've done for some reasons: www.tudorgheorghe.net

Hi, 

My name is Drilon and I am currently in my second year studying computer science with games technology.

I have always been a big fan of game development, as much as playing the games were enjoyable I always wondered how each gameplay feature was coded, where the developers get these ideas and such. I have began testing my skills in programming about last year on unity and other projects during my academic years. I joined this to see what ability I have and see what I can improve on. I am looking for placement year after this year so this would be beneficial for me to showcase my skillset to game studios.

Good luck to everyone, hope you do well. Nice to meet you all!

Hey; Sondre here.

Computer science student at University College London, and obviously deeply into all things gamedev (especially weird ROM hacks).

Really happy to be a part of the contest. And many thanks to Grads In Games for putting it together - it is a great opportunity (not to mention nice motivation to sit down and actually ship a game ;)).

Hope to see all of you the showcase event April!