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Make Something Unreal Live 2013: Day 3 – or wi-fi do we fall

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I don’t know whether any of the project leads of Make Something Unreal’s four remaining student prototypes have ever booted up Alpha Centauri, but they certainly know what it feels like to play.

Today saw them badgered on all sides by well-meaning advisers – the brilliant, six-ideas-a-second tommy gun that is Jon Hare, onetime designer of Sensible Soccer; astute and empathetic Coffee Stain Studios CEO Anton Westbergh, a competition alumnus; four scientific envoys from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, all pushing the students to make more of this year’s genomics theme; and of course their own teams, waiting in the wings, watching their original design docs going up in flames.

These project leads have four days left. Four days left to win a commercial Unreal Engine 4 license, and kickstart their careers with the sort of bang that turns heads involuntarily. How do you think they coped with a choir of influential voices knocking about their already-busy heads? And, later, a dodgy wi-fi connection? (Clue: admirably.)

Here’s how. The Mendel’s Farm team took time out from completely revamping their HUD to take us through yesterday’s build of the unpredictable livestock management sim:

Polymorph developers Kairos Games worked to come to terms with a late-night design “epiphany”, as lead designer Dennis Foster cryptically expands:

Guarav Pant and the team behind family-friendly puzzle-platformer Beings studiously attended to the feedback they’d received from the gurus:

Disaster struck this afternoon as the venue’s wi-fi dropped, crippling a presentation of the multiplayer-only Epigenesis. In the aftermath, Dead Shark Triplepunch man Tobias Johansson characteristically unwearied as he demoed the game’s new animations and HUD elements:

And after a day sat in quiet contemplation during team presentations, former contestant and Sanctum developer Anton Westbergh offered his opinion on this year’s finalists and was very nearly consumed by lens flare in the process:

Jeremy’s at Gadget Show Live all this week to track the teams’ journey through the MSU final. To find all our stories to date conveniently collated for your delectation, check the Make Something Unreal Live 2013 tab.