Game development is a stressful but rewarding experience, as we’ve found out over the past 2 years.  Development on Sovereign Syndicate is progressing very well, but as with any project not every day has good news.  As we’ve discussed before now, we had gotten some funding from the Canada Media Fund to the tune of $15,000 for conceptualization of the game and we even overshot the normal expectations of what they define as conceptualization.  In short, our teaser demo is a polished experience, but obviously still very early.

Following conceptualization, we applied for the Canada Media Fund prototyping stream which has an upper limit of $250,000 that would help us finish a proper Steam demo and with any luck net us a publisher or further funding to complete the game and take it to market.  Back in July 2021 though we got the bad news, we were denied by the Canada Media Fund.

The feedback on our application was a bit hurtful, with the major issues identified primarily being that we are a new studio with no commercial releases to our name.  We took that personally because we really care about this project but decided that we needed to just put our noses to the grindstone and keep working.  As it turns out, you can apply for this funding stream twice for a particular project, so development continued, and we applied for that funding stream again in October 2021.

As you know if you’ve been reading these updates, we announced on January 30 that we were selected for prototype funding, and we couldn’t be happier. Now it’s time to make that push to complete the demo and get it up on Steam where all our fans and followers can finally play a solid vertical slice of our dream.  We hope you enjoy it.

– Tarmack