Blitz 1UP

Dare to be Digital BAFTA Ones to Watch award (Part 3)

This year's three Bafta-nominated games from the Dare To Be Digital competition are of an incredibly high quality. We were lucky enough to be at ProtoPlay and take part in the mentoring and judging of this year's competition. This is the final part of our look at the winning games - if you missed the first or second parts you can check them out here and here.


The final of the three 'Ones To-Watch' is MUSH, a platform puzzler for Windows Mobile 7 created using XNA. Due to the lack of availability of WM7 development kits during the competition the team developed the game on Zune hardware.

The game was created by Angry Manago. They travelled all the way from deepest, darkest representing the University of Wales.


Team Leader - Henry Hoffman
Programmer - Ahmed Zaman
Programmer - Matthew Dennis
Artist - Katharine Killick
Programmer - Greg O'Brien

Mush is an incredibly polished title with a really unique look, but that's not the most amazing thing about it, the most amazing thing is the way it controls.

You control Mush - a fluffy little orange guy (well, orange most of the time) who changes shape based on his emotions. As a player you get to adjust how he feels; happy, sad, angry or normal - and each mode effects how Mush moves through the environment.


Tilting the phone left or right causes our hero to walk in that direction. Drawing a smiley face on the screen makes him happy, drawing a sad smiley with your finger makes him sad. You shake the phone to make him angry and tap to return to normal. When he's smiling he floats upwards, when he's sad he falls... simple, but a joy to play.


The beauty of this system is that you really feel like you're affecting the little guy's emotions as you play, you find yourself smiling when you make him smile and growling when you make him angry - it really is fantastic fun.

Advertisement

The team are currently looking at various possibilities of how to make the game available to play for everyone but in the meantime you can check out the trailer they put together for the ProtoPlay event:




Dare to be Digital is a video games development competition that runs each year at the University of Abertay, Dundee. It's open to teams of five students (usually a mix of Artists, Programmers and Audio) from around the world. The teams live on site for 10 weeks and have that time to develop a prototype video game. They receive daily support and weekly training sessions from industry specialists from companies across the UK.

At the end of the competition, the prototypes are displayed at a special event in Edinburgh, Dare ProtoPlay, alongside the Edinburgh Interactive Festival in August. The general public as well as industry experts get to play and vote for the games. Prizes are then awarded to the winning teams at a special awards ceremony in a whole range of categories from the "Turner Broadcasting Adult Swim Award" to the publicly voted "Dare ProtoPlay Audience Award".

The three top games from the show are put through to the BAFTA Video Games Awards to compete for the coveted 'Ones to Watch Award', which will be presented early in 2011.

If you're interested in knowing more about the Dare competition check out this two part documentary:




You can read more about the competition itself here: http://www.daretobedigital.com

Check out That Angry Mango's blog and follow their development process here: Angry Mango's Blog

indiegamedeveloperfuncompetitionawardsMobileEducationipad

Back to News

Latest Comments

• Be the first to comment on this story.

Articles Archive

RSS