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BAFTA has announced the names of 44 finalists for the BAFTA Young Game Designers (YGD) competition.
Young Game Designers has been running every year since 2010, and is a series of workshops for those between ages 10-18. At the end of each year-long programme, an awards ceremony is held on the BAFTA Kids & Teens YouTube channel to celebrate the best indie game projects and their creators.
The independent British arts charity holds the BAFTA YGD competition each year in the hope that it can show everyone that games can be more than just a hobby, and is working with directly with many schools to help kids get hands-on experience and create new routes into careers in games.
There are two awards up for grabs again this year, and as usual, they’re each divided up into two age brackets (10-14 and 15-18) for a total of four competitions. One of the awards is the YGD Game Concept Award, which is more hypothetical and concept-driven, while the other is the YGD Game Making Award, which goes to the most impressive game prototypes.
The voting jury for BAFTA YGD is made up of professionals from across the UK games industry, and includes representatives from Rocksteady Studios (Batman: Arkham Asylum), Rare (Sea of Thieves), TT Games (LEGO® Star Wars™: The Skywalker Saga), PlayStation and Meta.
According to BAFTA, finalists were chosen ‘on the basis of the creativity of their vision and the technicality of their execution’, and the winners will now be chosen based on ‘their design and suitability for their chosen platform’. Last years winners included Tiled in Twilight, Carrier Pigeon: World Tour, Space Boids and Egglien, the last of which is now a fully published indie game that you can buy on both Steam and Nintendo Switch.
Games that win at BAFTA YGD will also be prominently featured at the Power Up museum exhibit, alongside both the game history, science and technology on display, and previous BAFTA YGD winners.
If you’d like to find out more details on the finalists and their games, you can do that here.
If you want to find out more about BAFTA YGD in general, you should visit their website.
