The computer game industry’s answer to Britain’s Got Talent and Dragon’s Den is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

Fourteen teams of student games designers have been taking part in the Dare to be Digital competition at Abertay University.

The tournament is widely recognised as an employment pipeline to the booming video game industry and it has also led to software programmers and artists forming their own companies.

This year 14 teams from as far afield as Norway, Canada, India and China have been spending 20 hours a day trying to create a prototype game under real commercial pressures.

Eric Stock from the Canadian team said: “This is as good a competition as we can get as students. It’s as close to actually working in a game company as you can get so I'd rate it 10 out of 10, it's been an amazing experience so far."

The fruit of the contestants labour will be judged at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where three winning teams will be nominated for BAFTA awards.

Dare to be Different Project Director Paul Durrant said: "I think we've made a big contribution actually. We’re becoming the main hunting ground for talent in the industry in Scotland, UK-wide and beyond. But not only that, some of the games have become products in their own rights and some of the teams have gone on to set up their own companies so there has actually been an impact beyond people just getting hired for the industry."

Last year's winner Jonathon Holmes now works as a software engineer with Scotland's biggest computer games company Realtime Worlds.

He said: "It helped me network within the games industry - helped me get recognised and it helped me to have something to showcase what I could do to people in the industry."