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Launch round funded company Cardboard Sword win Epic’s Unreal Developer Grant

Cardboard Sword’s The Siege and the Sandfox was one of the first projects that the UK Games Fund supported, with a £25,000 grant towards creating a prototype of their new IP. And things are getting bigger for the young indie studio; they have now been awarded a portion of the Unreal Developer Grant.

The grant, set up by Epic in February 2015 with a starting pool of $5,000,000, was designed to help promote and safeguard developers using the latest iteration of their engine, with awards between $5,000 – $50,000.

The five-person indie studio was formed by ex LittleBigPlanet PS Vita producers Aidan Howe and Olly Bennett in 2013, who spent their first two years working as consultants and outsourcers, including work on Roll7’s Not A Hero, and Coatsink’s Esper 1 & 2. This latest project is a brand new game by the team and the company’s first fully self-developed title.

Having secured support from the UK Games Fund in January this year, production from Cardboard Sword shifted full-time towards The Siege and the Sandfox, with the team expanding and a number of contractors being hired.

“We used the UK Games Fund grant to develop the project to a playable demo and have now shifted to using our own internal investment to cover further development. The Unreal Developer grant has given us a very welcome boost; we had budgeted assuming we’d never get it, but now that we have it’ll give us a greater contingency budget and allow us to invest more in things we otherwise couldn’t”

Olly Bennett, Cardboard Sword

“Cardboard Sword’s success with Epic demonstrates the complementary of our funding with Epic’s excellent Developer Grant initiative and is a credit to Cardboard Sword’s development approach. It’s also good to see this snapshot of the connected nature of the UK games ecosystem through the founders’ connections to other companies supported with prototype funding”

Paul Durrant, CEO