Almost 100 people from across the UK and Europe have competed in a 48 hour Games Jam at our annual gaming festival, Brains Eden.

Two teams made up of students from our BA (Hons) Computer Games and Visual Effects and BSc (Hons) Computer Gaming Technology courses were joined by UK teams from NUCA, Abertay, University Campus Suffolk, Teeside, Southampton Solent and from further afield, Pole 3D in Lille, France and Avans and NHTV in Breda, Holland.

The event, managed by our University's business network for the creative industries Creative Front Cambridgeshire, is growing year-on year. Creative Front Co-ordinator Clare Denham attributes this to new industry links: "This year's festival is 40% bigger than 2011, helped immensely by working with a network of partners from our new EU project VIVID, which we won in January 2012. We are so pleased to bring all these people together at Anglia Ruskin and be able to work with students and industry professionals over this 3-day event."

The Games Jam was a huge success with 19 teams and 95 competitors attempting to build a winning game from scratch in 48 hours. Specific software enables the games to be developed in this short space of time as Jon Skuse from Jumped Up Games explains: "Unity is a game engine which allows for very rapid development of games. The fact that you can do this in 48 hours when once, it would have taken a lot longer is quite something."

All 19 games were reviewed by a panel of judges consisting of Pete Giles, Creative Director at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, Mark Brassington Senior Artist from Jagex, Andrew Vidler Principal Programmer at Ninja Theory, David Braben Frontier CEO and Chris Doran COO of Geomerics.

Team 'Breathing Bits', a group of students from NHTV University of Computer Science in Breda Holland, took the top prize with their game Space Tramp. This top-down game allows the player to bounce from a large trampoline, each bounce revealing more of the environment around the character. The runners up were Team Placeholder Games from University Campus Suffolk, who also impressed the judges with their 31-level platform puzzler, Upsy Down.

In addition to the Games Jam, Brains Eden featured guest lectures from five leading speakers from industry and academia, a digital game art exhibition in Ruskin Gallery (including a showcase of all the games created in the Games Jam) and a Careers Clinic with 1-2-1s for students to meet and gain advice from professionals in the video games industry.

"We have been delighted by the quality of work developed under such a tight time constraint and are keen to bring emerging creative talent from a wider array of international origins in 2013" said Games Eden Chair, Jeremy Cooke.

"Cambridge creatives are world-class and our goal is to provide Brains Eden participants with a flavour of the creative opportunities and lifestyle on offer here while bringing the media spotlight to Cambridge - Europe's largest digital creative hub."

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