‘It’s so surreal’: Sheffield Hallam students secure a UK first with PS5 game launch

When a final-year project made it on to the Playstation Store, the students who developed it gained industry recognition – and showcased the credentials of their university’s game-design courses

Racecar Crashers is a high-octane video game where players race cars around a circuit, smashing into each other, sabotaging opponents, finding shortcuts and ricocheting across the track as they race to the finish line. It’s pure, high-adrenaline fun and is available to play on PlayStation 5.

But perhaps the most striking thing about this game is that it was designed by a team of students on the computer games technologies course at Sheffield Hallam University as part of their final year project. Racecar Crashers is the first student game in the UK to be published on the PlayStation Store and only the second student game in the world to be released on PS5.

The programming team, Trajectile Interactive, consists of Charlie Edwards, Luke Hibbert, Gergő Kocsis and Aliyaan Zulfiqar. They all graduated from Sheffield Hallam with first-class degrees in 2025, thanks in part to their work on Racecar Crashers.

“It’s the first game any of us has published,” says Edwards. “It’s so surreal seeing a project you’ve worked on for nearly a year become available on PlayStation – it was a fantastic feeling being able to play it with my little brother. It’s been a long journey to develop the game, and it’s been incredibly rewarding to get it published.”

‘We just kept playing the game because it was so much fun’

Work on the project began in January 2025 and by April the team had created a pilot. Hibbert says: “From then on, honestly, we just kept playing the game because it was so much fun. We thought we must be doing something right because we just wanted to sit there playing it.” They took Racecar Crashers to five or six gaming events where it was played by people in the industry who offered helpful feedback, which the team then implemented.

As part of the course, the team pitched the game to developers and publishers. They took it to Steel Minions, Sheffield Hallam’s in-house games studio, who were impressed with its playability. They published the game on the PlayStation Store in December and since then, it has been downloaded hundreds of times.

A key aspect of Hallam’s computer games technologies course is that students are expected to build their own game engine – the specialist software that powers the game – rather than using a ready-made engine such as Unity or Unreal. Using the C++ coding language, the team built every step of the Racecar Crashers game engine, which taught them about the fundamentals of game design. Learning the C++ coding language prepares students for a variety of software development jobs – not just in gaming but also in areas such as finance, deep tech and robotics.

Course tutor Luke Melville, a senior lecturer in games and artificial intelligence, says Hallam tries hard to mirror a professional environment in coursework as they prepare students for the world of work.

“For the students’ final games assessment, we emulate the industry and ask a commercial producer to assess the projects. If you were an indie studio, you would create a prototype and put it in front of a publisher – if you could get an audience – to see if you can get funding.

“So, I got the team to do that and they got some great feedback because it had a really good replay factor – you’d pick it up and struggle to put it down because it’s such fun. That was when we realised that the game had enough quality and was well scoped enough to be published.”

Sheffield Hallam’s links to the gaming industry

Melville adds that Hallam’s gaming courses have strong links with the game development ecosystem across Yorkshire and the north of England. Graduates have gone on to work at games houses such as Sumo Digital and Steel City Interactive based in Sheffield. The computer games technology course offers students opportunities to associate with these companies.

Games development studio Rockstar Leeds is collaborating with all Rockstar Games studios worldwide to develop Grand Theft Auto VI, the latest version of GTA, which is one of the most successful games franchises of all time. The studio is part of a thriving games scene in Yorkshire, one that Sheffield Hallam is actively working with.

Paul Parry, associate head of the School of Computing and Digital Technologies at Sheffield Hallam, says the university sees employability and getting graduates into work as key aspects of its degrees.

“One of my goals over the next few years is to try and help launch games companies within the region of Sheffield and South Yorkshire.

“We’re trying to get students to stay and work locally when they finish their course, and I’ve got a project going with Sheffield city council and Business Sheffield to try and find ways to get students to start a business here,” he says.

Undoubtedly the employability associated with the course is a testament to Hallam’s “career promise”, which uses the seven letters of “promise” as an acronym for its offer to students: Practical learning, Research-enriched study, Outcomes-focused assessment, Meaningful employer connections, Individual support, a Student recruitment agency and the Employability guarantee.

“It’s fair to say that on our course they hit all of those,” says Hibbert, who is now working for games developer RubberBandGames, which approached him after seeing media coverage of Racecar Crashers.

By recreating authentic industry conditions for its computer games course, Sheffield Hallam has shown that it can prepare students for their dream jobs.

Find out more about Sheffield Hallam at shu.ac.uk