University of Sheffield students create games for charity available on App Store and Google Play

What started as an idea from two friends less than a year ago, has now grown into what is believed to be the biggest team of students producing video games at any UK university.

More than 25 students, all on various degree programmes across the arts, humanities, engineering, science and social sciences, have now joined the initiative.

From programming, sound production and graphics design, to story writing, character creation and marketing - the students have built several teams working in every area of game development.

Furthermore, all of the students involved have no previous experience in video game production, but they are using their passion for gaming, their desire to work in the industry and skills gained from their degree to learn how to develop games as they go.

The team has already produced two games – Color Dash and Flight Frenzy – both endless runner-style games in which the player has to avoid obstacles while constantly moving and survive for as long as possible.

The students were awarded funding from a co-curricular activities fund in Sheffield’s Faculty of Engineering, which has enabled them to buy a publishing licence for the Google app store, so Color Dash is available to download now and Flight Frenzy is due to be released later this year.

Two more games called Turtle Odyssey and Chef's Last Stand are currently in development.

Najaaz Nabhan, an international student from Sri Lanka and one of the founders of Project Pixel, said: “We know that gaming is a part of so many people’s lives, whether that be people who play casually on their phone or people who play more competitively, so we wanted to try to tap into this to raise funds for charity.

“The gaming industry is huge - bigger than the music and film industries combined - but from what we’ve seen many charitable initiatives are based around sponsored gaming. We wanted to do something different, so we thought why not make our own games and donate all of our revenue to charity.

“There are lots of students who make video games, it’s a common field, but we haven’t seen a team of this size at any university who are making games for charity.”

To help get Project Pixel off the ground, the students sought advice from Sumo Digital - an award winning video game developer based in Sheffield, which has worked on some of the industry’s biggest titles. The students met with Jake Habgood, Director of Education Partnerships at Sumo, who is also a visiting professor at the University.