This year's Make Something Unreal Live - Epic's annual game making contest - has announced a winner. Epigenesis was crowned king of the grueling week-long final, held at Birmingham's NEC. It's a team shooter/ball game described by Mike Gamble, contest judge and Epic's European territory manager, as a "potential eSport". That makes it likely the only eSport developed around Mendelian inheritance - the process with which hereditary characteristics are carried between generations - which was this year's contest theme.
The contest was judged by NVIDIA's Phil Wright, UKIE CEO Jo Twist, T3's Matt Hill, the Wellcome Trust's Iain Dodgeon, Epic's Mike Gamble and Peter Molyneux. The four finalists were competing for a pristine new commercial license of the Unreal Engine 4.
Developed by Dead Shark Triplepunch of the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, Epigenesis has teams competing across an abstract arena of floating platforms. Players are fighting over a single ball, hoping to get it through their opponent's hoop. Score, and you can place a seed on one of the platforms, claiming it for your side. Your ultimate aim is to link a chain of platforms to the other side's endzone. When Marsh saw the game last week , he said it was "perhaps the most complete and instantly gratifying of all the games in the competition," but also noted its implementation of the overall theme - power-ups that grow out of plants - was, at the time, lacking.
The runner-up was Polymorph by Kairos Games of Staffordshire University. In it, your protagonist can merge his DNA with the surrounding wildlife, growing adaptations that let him traverse the colourful platforming environment. They win a commercial license for Unreal Engine 3.
Third and fourth place went to Beings and Mendel's Farm respectively. You can find more details on them, and the two winners, in Marsh's competitor round-up .
Thanks, PCGamesN .
