Game students are the pride of college Town’s art-installation lions are inspiration for winning theme

Game design students had their latest creations tested to the limit by a group of Paisley primary pupils.

The youngsters helped judge the work of HNC games development students at West College Scotland and well and truly put them through their paces.

Using the theme of Paisley 2021 as an inspiration, the students had spent 10 weeks developing, designing and finetuning their games ready for testing by pupils from Lochfield Primary School.

And after a thorough assessment, the children awarded the first prize to Pride of Lions, a game that allows players to impersonate a Paisley lion and compete against other lions in a series of trails around famous landmarks in the town.

The BARDS team, which included, David Cavana, Ben Cunningham – audio designer – Sam Burrows, Ryan Duffy and Adam Dickinson, took photographs of Paisley’s famous landmarks and incorporated them into the game.

They also created some amazing animated lions, allowing the players to choose from more than a dozen patterns for their animal of pride.

Sam Burrows, the winning team’s lead programmer, said : “It was really fun to take our game from the initial idea to completion, and we learned a lot in the process.

“Working as a team, we could each play to our strengths – in terms of creating graphics, animating, programming, and so on – to make the game as visually fleshed out and fun to play as we could.

“The task of making the game pertinent to Paisley 2021 was, for us, a useful stimulus for creating the core idea.

“This was a multi-player game featuring Paisley lions, inspired by the Pride of Paisley art project, and it gave us focus in working on the various game-play modes.

“The day that the children of Lochfield Primary School came to play and rate our games was an exciting event for everybody as the culmination of this graded project for all three HNC classes.

“When we saw the kids’ enthusiasm for our game, we knew all our hard work had paid off.”

The West Brawlage Scotland game, by team Peng Ting, came in second place in the competition and Goo Busters, by the Unpaid Gamers team, came in third.

The day the kids came to play and rate our games was an exciting event. When we saw their enthusiasm, we knew our hard work had paid off Sam Burrows

Great fun The games were put through their paces

Winners The BARDS team, Ryan Duffy, Sam Burrows, David Cavana and Adam Dickinson and, inset, The Pride of Lions game that was a huge hit with the pupils who tried it out