Final judging for students who Dared to be Digital

The winners of the Dare to be Digital competition for Scottish third-level students have been announced, with an innovative team-based RPG title and a quirky adventure game set in a zoo taking the top prizes.

The competition was judged by a panel of six experts from the games industry, who had to choose between seven digital media projects - six of them games - which were developed by teams of students in just ten weeks after the concepts had been approved.

Among the entrants was an adventure game set in a prison, a mobile massively multiplayer football management game and a game designed to aid the learning of foreign languages - with the only non-interactive entry being an animated TV series for young teenagers.

However, the final winners of the competition were Demon Lore and Zoo Crew, which won the award for innovation and creativity and the award for greatest market potential respectively.

Demon Lore is a third person, team-based RPG designed along the same lines as Blizzard's Diablo II and taking its creative inspiration from the ancient mythology of a number of different societies. The other winner, Zoo Crew, is a comedic puzzle-focused adventure title starring an eclectic cast of animals who must work together to escape from a zoo, and uses cel-shading for its characters.

Last years winners created an adventure title called Gumshoe, and later went on to form development studio Hiding Buffalo. Although it's probable that none of the winners of this years contest will ever be published in their current form, the talented teams behind them are clearly determined to break into the games industry - and we're sure to be hearing much more from them in the coming years.