Lovro

Lovro graduated from Game Art at the University of Worcester in 2023, and after spending a bit of time travelling around the UK to see the big cities and take in the sights, he returned to his home in Zagreb to begin his career.

Now, he’s on the verge of releasing his very first video game, from Vestigial Forms, the studio he founded.

“Even though I studied Game Art because of my love of video games, I discovered a love of board gaming at university,” he said. “I’d always enjoyed playing, but I’d never really been around people who were into it in the same way I was, but at university I found people who I could play with, and in the end I got all of my household and uni friends into playing games!”

It was one of several loves that Lovro was able to indulge during his time at Worcester. He led the University’s Creative Writing Society, he played drums for the Musical Theatre Society and even represented the University in Ultimate Frisbee.

It was through this that he discovered his love for storytelling and creative expression that would later influence his work as a game developer.

“When I got home, I continued to play board games, and a friend suggested I go along to a board game festival,” Lovro explained. “There, by some happy accident, I ended up playing a prototype with one of Croatia’s most successful board game designers, a senior figure responsible for video game funding, the owner of a major design studio, and me!”

He clearly made a good impression; within a week he was writing a board game blog for them and was sent to Germany to interview famous game designers.

“After that I wanted to start making a video game,” he said. “I started asking people that I knew if they would be willing to participate in this weird project with me to just make a game. Luckily, enough people said yes.”

After months of research and planning, his studio secured funding, and began working on COOKBOT.

“It’s a videogame set in a sci-fi kitchen. You’re a robot, and people come to you in the window and give you an order, and you make their recipe through cutting up food, mixing it, freezing it, cooking it, and so on.”

“But what makes it special,” explained Lovro, “Is that they give you a story. Either through dialogue, or just mumbling to themselves, and some people will anthropomorphise you in some way. Within that narrative, we explore how we treat inanimate objects, and what that says about our characters.”

He added: “Some people might mistreat you, and they’re the antagonists of the story. I am playing around with ideas like prejudice. People have really enjoyed playing it during the testing phase.”

As he nears the demo phase of his creation, Lovro said looking back, his time at the University of Worcester gave him the skills he needed to succeed in the complex and technically challenging world of game development.

“I think what I found most valuable in preparing me for life, and this kind of career and the intensity of it all, is the way it was all structured,” he said. “There’s pressure to meet deadlines, organise your work, manage your time, and university gave me the tools and systems to enable me to learn more in a more organised way.”

“Also, the community around the University of Worcester is just amazing,” added Lovro, who is working on his project with a fellow Worcester graduate.

“One word springs to mind when I think of Lovro, and that is positivity,” said Jacqui Edwards, Senior Lecturer and Course Leader for Game Art. “He embraced all of the opportunities that the University of Worcester afforded him, to the point that we joked that I kept seeing his photo everywhere, from sustainability projects to working with Student Ambassadors, Lovro is someone who gets involved and has an open mind to see where saying ‘yes’ to something might take him.” Since Lovro graduated, the University of Worcester has been named University of the Year for Graduate Jobs in the 2027 Daily Mail University Guide, with judges praising the university’s record for securing high-skilled employment for its graduates.

It’s an especially exciting time for students coming to Worcester to study in the Institute of Arts and Humanities, with a recent report ranking Worcester as the number one top creative city in the UK.

Jacqui Edwards said: “We offer a course that allows students to experience wide ranging disciplines within Game Art, from concept art to 3D, balancing artistic and technical skills, but we also recognise the importance of transferable and soft skill development to make sure our graduates are highly employable and entrepreneurial, no matter what the choose to pursue when they leave us.

Learn more about studying Game Art at the University of Worcester.