2025 Young Game Designers: ‘Game Making’ Finalists

A minimalist exploration game where you navigate complete darkness using only sound. Playing as a knight who has lost their sight, you rely on a sonar gun that emits sound waves to briefly reveal your surroundings. Set in a pitch-black environment, the game challenges players to move carefully using sound and memory. There is currently no storyline beyond the main character, but future plans include developing a plot, adding more levels, and refining the game's art style for consistency. Through making Echolocation, the entrant learned how to build systems in Unity, code gameplay mechanics, and add polish to enhance the player experience. The game emphasises atmospheric immersion and the unique mechanic of sonar-based navigation.

A top-down dungeon crawler where you are an army general who has decided to raid the local dungeon for money, as you are running out of creative excuses as to why paychecks are late again. You gather a large army of troops and advance through a dungeon filled with enemies and treasure. For the Gold is a game of chicken, your score is determined by how much gold you have when you decide to leave the dungeon - die and you get nothing. Each time you start a new run, the dungeon has a different layout, and there are new enemies and treasures to find. Good luck out there, and remember; you're only in there for the gold!

A challenging, anger-inducing 2D platformer focused on precision, timing, and clever use of a grappling hook. Players use simple controls - A and D to move, Space to jump, and Left Click to fire the grappling hook - to navigate increasingly difficult levels filled with traps, tricks, and sudden surprises. Each time the player reaches a portal at the end of a level, they're thrown into a new and more intense challenge, with no two levels being the same. The first level offers helpful hints, but after that, players are on their own. Planned improvements include refining sprite design, enhancing the grappling hook mechanics for smoother gameplay, and ramping up the overall difficulty to test players' skill and patience.

An addictive cosmic puzzle game where you drop planets to merge them into ever bigger celestial bodies, trying to create a supermassive blackhole to clear your way to more high scores. Identical planets combine to form new planets, and players need to make their drops in the right places to ensure they don't block themselves and fill the well; game over. The merging planets get ever bigger until a star is created and then two stars will create a blackhole which clears the playing space to allow for higher scoring. There is a high score leader board and the game features a soundtrack with multiple different tunes to enjoy. Merge planets, climb the leader board, and create your ultimate galaxy!

An action roguelike real-time strategy based on chess where you need to pay taxes each round to a greedy king by defeating enemies. In a land ruled by a greedy king, you must pay taxes that increase every round. You need to claim bounties by defeating enemies in chess to pay this tax. As the taxes get higher and higher, the challenge increases with harder enemies but better bounties. Use the money you have left over each round to buy new pieces and expand your chess army. Do you have the skills that it takes to keep paying the ever-increasing tax? Future implementations include custom pieces not normally found in chess and a wider range of shop items.

A fast-paced action roguelike game about fighting malware in a computer. You play as a cyber security guard (a cute lizard), sent to defend a computer from malware threats. Defeat 16 waves of different types of malware (e.g. Viruses, bugs, computer worms etc) to win. The final boss is the hacker who started the malicious attacks. You pick an upgrade in the form of a new malware deleting tool or more health points after clearing a wave. Waves get progressively harder and tools offered to you get more powerful as well. You lose all your progress when your health hits zero, leaving the computer to be hacked. You will have to start from the first wave.

Taking place in a procedurally generated castle filled with eerie ambient sound you play as a noble knight with a magnificent Floof, a lethal plume. Using a hair slam and explosive floof throws, your knight battles skeletons and bats in pursuit of the legendary Golden Floof—the fluffiest treasure of all. The adventure begins with a tutorial where the player practices rolling, attacking, and collecting floof throw ammunition against a dummy. As Sir Floofington ventures through the different levels, he faces tougher enemies. He finds conditioner bottles that grant temporary immunity and heart pickups to restore his health. After clearing four dangerous levels, Sir Floofington reaches the castle’s highest chamber. There, he faces the mighty boss and guardian of the Golden Floof.

A difficult platformer with a unique twist - you can only jump! The game is set in a forest. The main character is a little red berry who must get back to his house before dinner. He has fallen to the bottom of the forest but he is so focused on his hunger that he can't stop running. This means that your only control is "jump". The aim is to bounce him back to his house and get him to his dinner. Future improvements would mean a change to the tree sprites to follow the same art style and the addition of a settings menu with volume sliders. This game is both fun and hard and also looks good.

A retro, top-down combat game where a plucky survivor of an advanced post-human corvid civilisation, must fight flocks of killer robot birds of their own creation, with eggsplosive traps! Set in the far future, the descendants of the corvid birds (called the boids) have developed an advanced civilisation. They built powerful autonomous machines, which one day turned against them. The player’s boid has evolved the ability to lay explosive grenade-like capsules instead of eggs and combines this with taking advantage of the droid horde's predictable flocking, to lure the enemies into traps. The player eventually fights their way to the final confrontation with the droid commander, destroying the last of the droids and freeing the boid civilisation.

A fantasy pixel-art side-scroller that blends intricate storytelling with stunning 8-bit graphics. There exists a harmonious world with three elemental Overseers: VERDANIS (nature), CYROMAR (ice) and PYROVUS (fire). Envious of their harmony, a menacing villain, ENVY, emerges and threatens to unravel their delicate balance. Only Willow, our hero, can restore order before it's lost forever. The player is immersed in a vibrant pixelated world filled with magic and monsters, spanning across four unique levels: the mystical Arcane Woods, the frosty lands of Frostbloom Peaks, the fiery terrain of Emberfall Valley, and the ominous VOID. As Willow, players collect key shards to unlock the next world by defeating enemies — all in preparation for the final battle against ENVY.

Taking place in a controlled testing chamber, a single, unchanging room where every trial occurs. While the player remains trapped inside, an unseen “Admin” observes and controls the environment from outside. At the end of each trial, time rewinds, resetting the room with new challenges, such as shifting gravity, lava, darkness, lasers, and eventually, reality-breaking glitches. The goal is always the same: to reach and press the red button. The player plays as XK-78A3, a prototype artificial intelligence model undergoing training, who must complete a series of increasingly complex parkour and problem-solving trials. As the player progresses, the simulation begins to break down, but as the simulation begins to break, so does the system trying to contain them.

A game which sees the player - a solitary astronaut, battle their way through musical levels, collecting upgrades in the form of records along the way. Each level includes a new boss, with a new soundtrack and beats to fight to. You must master battling and moving to the beat to outmanoeuvre and defeat the enemies. You will encounter music that increases in complexity, by changing in tempo or having enemies that move on the off beats. The enemies themselves all have entirely unique behaviours and ways of fighting, that means you must learn through experience how to beat them, with a new strategy every time. The player grows more powerful, as they gain magical music records that augment their powers.

An innovative puzzle platformer with a fun character who has a unique bounce ability he uses to overcome challenges and scale a tower block on a building site. Circle Boy thinks he’s a superhero because he has this special ability to bounce higher the further he falls. In this game, he wants to scale the highest tower block on a building site to achieve the ultimate bounce off the rooftop. There are easy levels where players learn the bouncing technique and how the puzzle elements work, before going onto more challenging levels that test and develop Circle Boy’s bouncing skills. The game feels fun, with the animation style, backgrounds and music all showing a sense of humour.

A fast-paced single player platformer set in the 1600’s on the beautiful island of Mauritius. Drawing upon the African and Indian culture, an Afro-beats soundtrack sets the scene as you are introduced to two very friendly dodos called Danny and Denny. Sailors have captured one of them and now it’s a race against dinner time. Making their way through the island’s different levels the player needs to dodge predators along the way and, as the dodo is a flightless bird, use palm trees to climb up platforms. There’s also plenty of delicious fruit for the dodo to eat to score extra points. Your mission is to rescue, lead them to Lion Mountain and save the dodos from extinction.

A game that takes place in a vast, industrial facility now, for the most part, empty. The factory deems you an "anomaly" due to the facility's appalling quality, causing all sorts of mischief to stop you. You are a lone robot racing through endless corridors and floors trying to avoid deadly entities all while completing tasks at machines as your oil depletes over time. You have only one goal, survive the increasingly difficult obstacles in your path. Your survival depends on finding machines to refill your oil bar, however the unpredictable and random encounters force you to adapt and be more cautious. To win you need to rely on quick thinking and reaction to situations, the game requires you to go fast, but not foolishly.

A combination of demon fighting and furniture arranging, two very different gameplays that come together in a strangely compelling juxtaposition. You are a pro ninja and first-time homeowner, just unpacking your things, when the underworld comes through the floorboards to stop you. Fortunately, your furniture powers you up and gives you new abilities to face the ghouls. Placement of furniture is very important, and you need to match furniture with similar furniture. Happy furniture is powerful furniture, so you need to treat your furniture right. The combat rewards timing and reflex skills, whereas the decoration rewards strategy and puzzle solving. You need to master all these skills to do well. Beat demons, master tasteful home design, and repeat.

An eerie narrative-driven game. It is set inside the fractured mind of a person who has forgotten his own name, and follows his journey as he tries to remember who he is, where he is, and how to get out. The player has to complete trials which all contain unique gameplay mechanics along with pieces of the story that can be obtained in any order, allowing the player to make their own theories. The game never fully descends into horror, as to ensure that anyone can play the game. There are no jump-scares for this reason. The game culminates with a surreal nightmare/dream sequence, leading to a tense escape sequence combining all of the mechanics that the player has learnt.

Set inside an abandoned war-torn mega city, where you control a little rusted oil lantern, exploring your way through the cold city. Each level the player is welcomed to a new area of the city, from the collapsing skyscrapers, to the parliamentary building; they are unique and have many hidden secrets, where the player can look and find. Your goal is to save the dying lanterns and light up the dark world. Complete puzzles requiring your light, bounding on mirrors and saving your lantern friends to brighten the area. Showing the true history of this dystopian world. With hidden messages in real world (Ukrainian) languages, similar corporate logos, and government sigils, the story is shown and not told.

A game where you have to follow the sound of music in the darkness, in order to complete the maze. It is based on how blind people play games and raising awareness. The player needs to get through 4 different mazes in the darkness. They are required to listen to the music to help them get through. The game requires a gamepad, as that will give out rumble effects for the player to know if they are hitting walls. There are flare mechanics, which can light up the area for a brief time. However, these flares are very limited so players are required to use them wisely. Subtitles allow deaf players to equally enjoy the game.

A Quasi 3D horror game where the player has to escape a kidnapper's home, isolated from the world in the woods. Across five days, the player must traverse through each room in the house, find different items and, avoid their captor at all costs in order to find a path that will help them be free from this maze and break out. The player will have a set amount of time each day to locate items scattered across the house and return to the basement before the kidnapper returns home. Puzzles and minigames will be a hindrance as the player must complete them in order to obtain the items they need. Everything aids in your ultimate escape.