Indie Fund Adds New Investors, Funds Armello

Indie Fund, run by industry luminaries including Jonathan Blow and Kellee Santiago, has announced new changes to their framework of assisting indie developers.

“We’ve got some exciting news to announce about the future of Indie Fund. We have restructured how the fund is organized, which allowed us to add more investing partners.

This means more ways to contact us, more brains to pick, more available funds, and hopefully more games! We’ve funded a couple games under this new model, and we are proud to announce the new expanded Indie Fund is now funding Armello, due to launch later this year.”

Armello is a procedurally generated, turn-based strategy game where one to four players vie for the throne of a mad king through loyalty, hostility, or treachery. It combines the best elements of card and board games with the capabilities of digital platforms for an experience that’s simple to start but deeply complex and replayable. While stories within individual sessions will differ, Armello is set in a rich and beautiful world reminiscent of Game of Thrones – were the warring houses of Westeros replaced by clans of woodland creatures.

“Armello is both extremely pleasing to the eye and crammed full of creamy gameplay goodness; it somehow manages to feel simultaneously familiar and innovative. This is the kind of game that makes people willingly sink a huge amount of time and I’m excited to contribute to it as our first investment via Indie Fund,” said Paul Kilduff-Taylor of Mode7 Games, the team behind acclaimed strategy game Frozen Cortex and one of the latest developers to join Indie Fund.

The original 7 partners of Indie Fund started in 2010 with the goal to support the growth of games as a medium by helping independent developers get and stay financially independent. We’ve helped fund over 30 great independent games, and almost all of them have met our internal success benchmark in that they allowed their developers to self fund their next game from the revenue of the game we funded.

However, after doing anything for 5 years, life changes — kids arrive, people start new projects, games come and go — and we started to feel like we needed to change the way the fund operated. Fortunately, many more independent developers have had their own success in the last five years, and have now come on to help out.

Last year we started partnering with individual investors outside of the fund with good results. More people got to participate, which meant developers had access to more capital, ideas and advice. With this more ad-hoc model, investors could vary the amount they wanted to put into each game, allowing more flexibility depending on life changes, interest in the specific projects, and how much money is available. Games like Future Unfolding, Duskers, and now Armello have been funded with this more flexible model.

Internal structure aside, all the fundamentals behind the fund will remain the same. We will continue to be selective about the projects we fund, be transparent about our work, and judge our own success by the success of the developers we fund.

We’re now fully adopting this model, and Indie Fund will be managed by a much larger group of investors moving forward. We’re especially pleased that some of the new partners are developers we’ve funded that are now looking to invest in the next generation of developers. We have a list of current partners, along with our updated guidelines on how to apply.