The winners of the AirConsole Student Contest have been chosen! Students from 9 different schools and universities from Europe, South Africa and North America have sent us their AirConsole games that they created this semester.

First of all, a huge THANK YOU to everybody who submitted their project to the AirConsole Student Contest!

We had a blast playtesting all of your games with the entire team and then discussing their merits and shortcomings. And as in previous contests, we had a hard time choosing which game deserved the prize money the most.

So without further ado, let us proudly introduce the winner of the AirConsole Student Contest 2016:

Basher Beatdown

Contest Winner, Awarded $2500

Sword GC - NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences, Netherlands

Basher Beatdown convinced us with its high level of polish, its awesome music and its incredibly satisfying mechanic to throw friends into the mouth of a beast.

Using virtual joystick controls on AirConsole is never really ideal due to the whole lack of tactile feedback on the touchscreen. Basher Beatdown is no different in that regard, but its controls work well enough that after the first or second try, all of us dashed around the platforms with little problems.

We’ve played few things on AirConsole that are as satisfying as finally managing to successfully knock someone out, grab them before they can flee, and throw them into the beast’s gaping maw.

Basher Beatdown is not an incredibly complex game in its current form, but it made us shout and yell and throw our phones around when we lost - even at 10 in the morning in our office!

This game is playable on AirConsole. It being launched already did not have an influence on its placement in the contest, but of course, being launched and being chosen as contest winner are both based on the AirConsole Judging Criteria.

Hotline

Runner Up, Awarded $500

Marcel Arioli, Omar Barone - ZHdK Zurich University of the Arts, Switzerland

Hotline is a team-based competitive game about conquering territory by riding along lines and swiping with the right timing.

This game has got an impressive variety of levels already and directional swipe controls that perfectly fit the smartphone controllers. We fell in love with the scoreboard at the end, where you see how much points you scored during the game with good and bad swipes, and when in the game which team dominated the playing field.

Hotline rocks a minimalistic neon art style and is polished to near perfection. And once you fully understand the mechanics, it’s got a surprising amount of strategy and depth.

In accord with the game’s developers, we hope to launch Hotline on AirConsole very soon!

Honorable Mentions

SpaceBot Knights, by Juan Callejas of Northern Secondary School, Canada

SPK has been live on AirConsole for longer than the student contest was even announced, but we wanted to point out once again how fantastically polished and satisfying this game is to play - especially the fast-paced “Sudden Death” mode.

Derailed, by Group MTA16542 of Aalborg University in Aalborg, Denmark

This one gets the “Diamond in the Rough” award from us. Derailed is about keeping a train rolling by taking care of various little tasks that pop up on every player’s controller.

We see great potential in this project and hope to see an improved, polished version for the Main Contest in February.

Robot Rumble, by Chris Bruce of James B. Conant High School, USA

Robot Rumble receives the Contruct2 Business License mention for the innovative 3D robot mayhem game. Congrats guys!

It is worth mentioning that our team had a very hard time deciding on a definitive winner, particularly between the two finalists, Basher Beatdown and Hotline. We got to play various very cool new games this week and we hope to eventually launch as many of them as possible in our Store.

In the coming days, we will directly contact all participants to send them detailed feedback of what we thought about their games and how we recommend they improve them for a chance to win the main Game Dev Contest that runs until February 2017.