Andrew Heywood

Andy originally obtained a BEng in Software Engineering from the University of Edinburgh, before travelling up to Dundee to earn an MSc in Computer Games Technology.

Having successfully completed the course in summer 2005, he embarked upon the Dare to be Digital games competition as part of The Frozen North team. After 10 weeks spent glistening like a sweating ox in the air-conditioning-free zone of the University of Abertay’s computing labs, The Frozen North won the ‘Product with Greatest Market Potential’ award for ‘Primary Steps’, a spelling game which cunningly used a dancemat interface to convince little kids that they weren’t actually learning anything. The team went on to win a BAFTA Scottish Students on Screen award for the prototype game, which has since been commercially developed, and is now in hundreds of classrooms across Scotland.

After returning home to Edinburgh, Andy started working for real at Outerlight, who independently released their first game ‘The Ship’ in summer 2006. The company then began work on a pseudo-sequel to ‘The Ship’ for a large publisher, which will hopefully see the light of day sometime in 2009.

In May 2009 Andy finally grew tired of Edinburgh’s cosmopolitan style, sophistication, and packs of roaming wild cats, and decided to move to Dundee, where he’s now working as a Gameplay/AI Engineer at Ruffian; but only until he’s saved up enough money to fund his own personal army of winged monkeys, which he intends to put to work making hit Wii games.