Tranzfuser, the graduate talent development competition from UK Games Talent and Finance CIC (UKGTF) and funded by the UK government, has announced the winning teams taking part in this year’s competition across the UK Local Hub network including a WagTails, based at The Pixel Mill in Belfast.
Participating teams will work on their individual games over the course of the summer, getting a playable demo for a large consumer games show in the Autumn. There they will vie for the attention of the playing public, standing alongside the AAA games of 2019.
WagTails is a sweet endearing game where you play as a ghost cat chasing ghost mice all over your beloved owners home. Even though you’re dead your job isn’t done.
This ageless game targets the casual gaming audience. You’ll only have a certain amount of time to capture all the mice and as you follow your owner throughout the house the mice are finding better places to hide forcing you to think outside of the box to catch them.
The WagTails team commented; “We feel very grateful and excited as a team to be part of the Tranzfuser project! We are looking forward to developing our skills, getting into the industry and showing what a small team from NI can do!”
Northern Ireland Screen’s start up space for game developers, The Pixel Mill, acts as a regional hub for Tranzfuser in Northern Ireland.
This year’s competition also sees the teams attend a bootcamp-style Practice Pitch event in Dundee; in preparation for the full pitch to the UK Games Fund team at the Autumn consumer show for support of up to £25,000 for the development of their project, the teams will practice their pitching skills to a range of industry professionals.
The Practice Pitch event will determine which teams go on to exhibit at the consumer games show later this year.
Deborah Farley, Head of Talent and Outreach at Tranzfuser, said:
“This is now our fourth year of running Tranzfuser. Each year we iterate and improve our offering to match the consistent levels of talented graduates we see coming through the competition. This year our offering has expanded starting with the Jamfuser game jam back in March, during the summer programme we will be piloting our new Games Biz Academy which will offer the teams online learning, linked into our badge accreditation system via our UKGTF Badge Academy.
At our Practice Pitch event our teams will get the all too real-world experience of pitching; we want all of them to learn and grow based on the experience, however daunting it may initially seem.”
The full list of teams and Local Hubs can be found here.
