Year 3 team win Ukie Student Game Jam 2021

Team Mischievous, a Year 3 team made up of BA (Hons) Games Art and Design and BA (Hons) Animation students, have won Ukie’s Student Game Jam 2021 with their game The Juniper and the Drought.

The win follows Team Mischievous’ 2020 success in the Ukie annual #raisethegamejam. 

For the game jam, Ukie Students partnered with Digital Schoolhouse and WaterAid by linking the theme to the recent international Mobo Game Jam.

The jam, which took place during the London Games Festival on the 22nd and 23rd of March tasked Ukie’s student game jammers with creating compelling games to raise awareness and find a solution to a lack of clean water in developing countries. 

Team Mischievous is made up of Year 3 students Charlotte Beale, Ben Tyreman, Jordan Eady, Conor Cliffe and Charlie Clark, all BA (Hons) Games Art and Design, and Beth Murcott, BA (Hons) Animation. 

Their game The Juniper and the Drought was made with the theme of water at its core. Based on their research into the water crisis, the team discovered that women and children around the world spend approximately 200 million hours collecting water every day.

Charlotte says, “We knew that this was something we wanted to start a discussion about, but spent some time trying to decide how to approach this topic with sensitivity and to give our game meaning. We decided to take a symbolic approach and tackle the theme with visual and narrative parallels. All the art, music and gameplay were designed with this purpose in mind.”

Of the game jam experience, Charlie says, “Taking part in these jams has really been useful in showing just how much we can achieve together in such a short amount of time and the question of start-up funding has been discussed between everyone in the team. Overall, we’ll try to continue with the momentum we have coming out of these two jams to hopefully create more projects we can feel proud of together in the future.”

Follow Team Mischievous on Twitter and watch gameplay online. 

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