💲 Funding 💲
[🌎] WingsFund
No specific deadline. A new funding initiative for female-led, commercially viable dev teams, offering $50k-$500k funding per project.
[🇬🇧] Innovate UK Innovation Loans
Deadline 11th September. Up to £10m in loans to SMEs for game-changing late stage innovations with strong commercial potential that will significantly improve the UK economy.
[🌎] Virtual Beings Grants
Deadline 17th September. Awards up of to $25k for projects focussed on avatars / digital humans.
[🇪🇺] Cinemas as innovation hubs
Deadline 25th September. Total of €2 million to projects that test new initiatives in regard to rethinking the cinema experience. [CM; eSports, AR and geolocation gamification possibilities here].
[🇬🇧] Strength in Places Fund - UK Research and Innovation
Deadline 9th October. £50k funding to support innovation-led relative regional growth with local collaborations involving research and innovation.
[🇬🇧] Innovate UK Smart Grants
Deadline 16th October. £25m fund for the best game-changing, innovative or disruptive ideas with a view to commercialisation. All proposals must be business focused. Applications can come from any area of technology (including arts, design, media or creative industries), science or engineering and be applied to any part of the economy. Up to £500k available for single applicants, up to £2m for collaborative projects.
[🇪🇺] XR4ALL Open Call
Deadline 31st October. A total of €1.5M is available and the maximum funding per selected project is €50,000, to develop new XR solutions e.g. plugins for games engines such as Unity, low level components based on open APIs, standards and frameworks such as SolAR, or any XR Application.
[🇪🇺] Horizon 2020 Interactive Technologies
Deadline 13th November. Develop AR/VR authoring tools for automated interactive content creation or develop solutions where the use of such technology is not mainstream. Focus should be on developing richer virtual environments, new user interfaces and improved immersion maximizing the feeling of presence. Budgets expected but not limited to being EUR 1.5-2 million with a duration from 12 to 24 months.
🏆 Awards 🏆
[🇬🇧] UK Business Tech Awards 2019
Deadline 13th September. Entries £100. Games appropriate categories include App of the year, Best Use of Innovation, Tech for Good, Most Impressive Growth, Agency of the Year, and Entrepreneur of the Year.
[🌎] IGF: Independent Games Festival
Deadline 30th September. Winners announced at GDC 2020. $20k in prizes. $75 entry fee.
[🌎] Game Development World Championship 2019
Deadline 30th September. The Game Development World Championship is an annual competition for Game developers, game development students and anyone interested in game development to join in.
[MENA] International Mobile Gaming Awards
Deadline 30th September. Celebrating the best mobile games made in the Middle East and North African region. Free entry.
[🌎] BAFTA's Games Awards 2020
Deadline 14th November. Open to developers, publishers or anyone involved n the production and/or promotion of a game provided it has/will be released in the UK in 2019.
📸 Showcase 📸
[🌎] DoubleFine's Day of the Devs looking for indie games for its 2019 showcase
Deadline 23rd September.
⏩ Accelerators ⏩
[London] Virgin StepUp
Deadline 13th September. A two-day, pre-accelerator programme for founders looking to scale their start-up.
💬 Speaker Calls 💬
[🌎] Speaker call for The Africa Games and Digital Applications Conference
No deadline, but conference is in Egypt starting 31st October so apply asap if interested.
[🌎] GDC Summits, Virtual Reality Developers Conference (VRDC), and Game Career Seminar call for speakers
Deadline 30th September.
[🇬🇧] November Scottish developer get-togethers
I host a series of events around Scotland for local game developers. Each event has nine speakers talking for just nine minutes each, so it's a great way for visiting developers, publishers, or anyone, to get to know the Scottish community better. Email me at colin@all4games.co.uk if interested in speaking at the November events.
💡 Inspiration 💡
GDC Talk: So You're Ready to Pitch to a Publisher? You're Not.
Finji's Rebekah Saltsman explains how Finji builds and uses pitch documents, key art and game play videos to help developers improve their pitches to publishers
💤 Housekeeping 💤
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