MDS Studios Accelerator Teams Announced
MDS Studios is a Business Accelerator Programme run by Media Design School. Each year we accept two teams of students from the Game Development degree into the programme to incorporate their own game studio and develop a game title (or creative technology project) for commercial release.
Places on the MDS Studios accelerator were highly contested in 2017, with seven teams vying for the two available positions on the programme.
Each team pitched their respective game titles to our MDS Studios industry panel, which consisted of MDS CEO Darryn Melrose, Blowfish Studios' Ellen Jurik, Goat Ventures CEO Shaveer Mirpuri, and Ben Ward of Five Eight Distribution. Collectively, the judges decided on the two teams that they felt had the most potential to take their entrepreneurial and commercial skills to the next level.
We are delighted to tell you a little bit more about the two winning teams for 2017: Clockwork Giants with Introspect and No Bark with Night Light.
Clockwork Giants - Introspect
Introspect is a fast paced boss battling shooter all about darting around giant machines and out-maneuvering their attacks to take them down.
Created by Simon Jiang; Connor Wallace-Christensen; Mark Croucher; Christopher Mills; Chris Stone; and Rodrigo Calderon, Clockwork Giants says that Introspect is "...all about taking on adversaries that are a lot stronger than you are, therefore, the player must learn to use all of the mechanics to their advantage in order to beat these challenges"
Check out some of the gameplay for Introspect here or check out Clockwork Giants' website and development blog here.
No Bark - Night Light
Night Light by No Bark is a first-person shooter horror game that plays around with using light sources to navigate the levels and out manoeuvre enemies. No Bark want to use horror as a game mechanic so that the player "...feels powerful but at the same time scared. [The players] have the means to fight back the zombie creatures with our light mechanics."
No Bark is comprised of Game Development students Sena Kim (Programming lead, project / team management); Xandre Du Plooy (Gameplay programmer, UI programming, Social media); Michael Williamson (AI programming, Gameplay programmer); Stanley Barrett (Lead Artist, Environment artist, level design); Zack Lim (Character artist, Environment artist, Play tester, level design); Phuc Tran (Animator, character artist & rigging, Cinematics); and Ye Xue (Character artist & rigging, Animator, Environment artist).
