The Cinema and Audiovisual Centre (CCA) of Belgium's French Community Government has distributed €626,500 in grants to nine video game developers as part of a call for projects launched at the start of the year, it announced on Wednesday.
These grants will be used to finance video game projects in their initial prototyping phase. This is "crucial because it enables the feasibility of the video game to be tested and the artistic and technical foundations, on which the projects will be developed, to be laid," explains the CCA.
The nine projects include a playful interactive storytelling game about emotions (Asfalia: Tristesse - Funtomata); a post-apocalyptic crafting game (BertX3 - Rablo Games); a vampire management game (Blood Bar Tycoon - Clever Trickster Studio); a medieval fantasy world (Earth of Oryn - Elivard); a survival game with an 80s horror film feel (Final girl - Little Big Monkey Studio); a cooperative game about reclaiming the Earth (Homecoming - Maracas Studio); a movement-based virtual reality exploration game (Skystranded - Team Panoptes); a dive into an abandoned space station (Starvester - Fishing Cactus); and a strategic combat game (Suit Kingdom - Pandaroo Interactive).
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All of the projects received between €50,000 and €75,000 in funding after scrutiny by the jury, made up of games journalist Gilles Banneux, educational adviser for the charity For'J Julien Annart, research officer at the Scientific Research Fund Fanny Barnabé, game development training manager at the Inteface3 training centre Nicole Lenoir, and illustrator Hélène Alonso y Cabanelas.
"More than a million Belgians play video games and they represent the leading creative industry in the world," said French-speaking Culture Minister Bénédicte Linard. "It is vital to support our French-speaking Belgian video game ecosystem."
