The Fat Pigeon Games team, which consists on six recent Westminster graduates, showcased their new game LEAP as part of the Tranzfuser 2020 competition.
Fat Pigeon Games consists of six recent Westminster graduates Artur Kass, Alberto Dal Corso, Sohail & Sohaib Sarwar from the Computer Games Development BSc Honours course, Scott Gubbins who studied on the Music: Production, Performance and Enterprise BA BMus course and Binghao Guo from the Illustration and Visual Communications BA Honours course.
The team applied successfully through the Tranzfuser UK Games Fund in May 2020 and the University of Westminster virtually hosted them as one of the two accredited London Local Hubs as part of the Tranzfuser network. Tranzfuser is all about boosting the UK’s future games development talent, and focuses on helping new teams come together and develop new games as a learning journey. They support team members who aspire to build a commercially sustainable studio or simply pursue a career as an employee or freelancer and want to use their project as evidence of their talent.
Now in its fifth year, Fat Pigeon Games was one of the 28 teams that was selected to take part in the Tranzfuser competition to pursue their dream to create their game studio.
Project LEAP is a first-person narrative puzzle game with character development, simple and unique mechanics that will keep players engaged throughout the entire story. The team have been working over the summer with the support of their appointed facilitator Sam Ibbitson, Co-Founder and CEO of Meteor Pixel Ltd, to produce the game prototype.
The game was launched successfully last week on ProtoPlay TV, and the team had the chance to showcase their work to both professionals and the public and receive valuable comments. Protoplay ran from Thursday 24 September to Thursday 1 October.
Talking about the competition, Markos Mentzelopoulos, Course Leader for the Computer Games Development BSc course and Local Hub Co-ordinator for Tranzfuser, said: “Tranzusfer is a great experience for third year students and recent graduates as it gives them the opportunity to work directly with professionals from the games industry, have access on their network and utilise their learned skills to work as an indie task force within the industry framework.
“This is the first year that we participated as a hub and successfully supported one of our Westminster teams. We do hope over the next years to have more successful stories as this is an opportunity for cross-disciplinary work between creative industry courses.”
Arthur Kass, Team Leader of Fat Pigeon Games, said: “As a team leader, this has been a great opportunity for me and the team. This project helped me achieve many of my ambitions/dreams in the short and long term for many years to come. This project helped me to learn many different aspects of game development and management to make it successful. Tranzfuser gives the ability to develop a game with my colleagues and will surely bring that something else to our future careers. A game that will leave our mark, even if it's small, in the vast world of video games.”
Audio Designer Scott Gubbins added: “Tranzfuser has given me the opportunity to work alongside the Computer Games Development BSc course and work within a team. Through this opportunity, I hope to improve my sound design skills and the ability to work to a brief. I also hope to get an understanding of music/sound design within the games industry. The games industry is an expanding industry and something I would be interested in pursuing. Tranzfuser will both test and educate me on my career decisions in the future.”
Binghao Guo, the team’s Illustrator and Environmental Art Lead, said: “I think the opportunity in Tranzfuser allowed me to test and apply my learned skills. It's also a great chance to meet people in the industry. In the competition, I hope I can become more mature in all aspects and have more opportunities in the future.”
Watch the LEAP Prototype teaser for Tranzfuser 2020.
