Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: All Seeing Eye, Developing Beyond Challenge, HRL, Lost Forest Games, seed, Terramars, Untold Games, Winter Hall

Developing Beyond Announces Finalists Seed, Terramars, And Winter Hall

Three game development teams have won a place in the final phase of the Developing Beyond Challenge, each earning $60,000 in funding after impressing a panel of esteemed judges at this year's Develop:Brighton conference.

Developing Beyond is designed to provide a sustainable platform for studios to create new minimum viable products. The intention is to prepare the teams to ship new commercial games with the help of investors, publishers or partners — which is pretty cool for small development teams with off-beat ideas.

This year, comedian and broadcaster Susan Calman led the panel of judges as they met with all six semi-finalist teams yesterday. Delving into the games' themes, Calman and fellow judges Professor Ian Goodfellow, Head of Virology at the University of Cambridge and Eurogamer's Chris Bratt, along with Epic's Mike Gamble and Iain Dodgeon from Wellcome, confronted microbial quarantine, human evolution, engineered plant life, adaptive artificial learning, acclimatising to life on Mars, and creative chronicling of the Black Death.

They agreed upon the following three games as finalists for the full $500,000 prize.

• Seed by All Seeing Eye – a virtual reality game where players are able to discover, grow and engineer plant life.
• Terramars by Untold Games – a game in which the player adapts to the environment of Mars by exploring the physiological and psychological challenges humans face when living on a different planet.
• Winter Hall by Lost Forest Games – a narrative exploration game about the legacy of the Black Death.

Calman said of the games:

"All six games are hugely creative and impressed the judges. Each had merit but the three we chose to go forward are those that integrated the Transformations theme alongside playability. I'm looking forward to revisiting the games over the coming months to see how they develop."

In January 2017, Epic Games and Wellcome launched the $500,000 year-long Developing Beyond competition. The brief prompted developers to create new games exploring the theme of "Transformations". They games had to take inspiration from scientific ideas and use Epic's Unreal Engine 4.

The six semi-finalists were selected from over 100 applications. This week they showcased their entries at Develop:Brighton to demonstrate the progress made since they received $15,000 and were matched with a scientist to explore their concept.

After huge deliberation, Untold Games, Lost Forest Games and All Seeing Eye were selected as the most promising teams. Each will now receive $60,000 to continue developing their title. The winning prize of $150,000 will be awarded in January 2018. Second place will be awarded $50,000 and third place will be awarded $30,000.

Games development legend John Romero along with historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes will join the jury for the final six months of the competition, which will whittle our three finalists down to one winner.

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