Fourth Year student, Andrew Ah-Weng, has been crowned the winner of the 2022 BAFTA Young Game Designer award for best original game in the 15-18 years category for his creation, Space Boids.
Space Boids is a roguelike set in space, where the player controls a flock of boids to fight waves of enemies. The player travels through a procedurally generated map, fighting enemies and upgrading their Boids. At each encounter, the player battles, gaining money to spend on upgrades and changing their loadouts of boids. At the end of each run, the player gets a score to represent the progress made throughout the game. The boids simulate the movement of birds flocking and Andrew says it was a challenge to tweak the algorithm so that the movement of the boids felt natural.
Mr El Moudden said: “Andrew is an exceptional talent. He has really taken the very popular game making project in the Computer Science curriculum by storm, with his love for programming and games development. For Andrew to achieve not just one, but two, successive awards from BAFTA shows the level of brilliance he’s capable of. We are very proud of how much Andrew has managed to achieve and look forward to seeing more of his ingenuity.”
Andrew added: “Winning means so much to me. I put so much work into this project and this award recognises all that work. In the future, I’d like to continue this game. I’ve a lot of ideas for improving it!”
“Andrew is a previous winner in the 10-14 years category. It’s great to see him growing in the gaming space – I can’t wait to check out what Andrew gets up to next,” pointed out the awards host, Inel Tomlinson
Well done, once again, Andrew!
A recording of the event can be accessed here
And the programme is available here
"For Andrew to achieve not just one, but two, successive awards from BAFTA shows the level of brilliance he’s capable of."
Mr El Moudden
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