Elbow Grease Games runs prototype mixer for its first accelerator class
Elbow Grease Games (EGG) has completed its first ever EGG Prototype Mixer with 10 game startups presenting to a crowd of game investors and publishers during the Game Developers Conference. Among the surprises: a new experience coming from sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson.
Started by John Graham, the founder of Humble Bundle, EGG is a Y Combinator-style accelerator for funding game prototypes. The game startups are part of its inaugural portfolio of game companies. (You can read EGG’s story here).
Graham started his career in 2008 running business development for Wolfire Games while they shipped Lugaru HD, Receiver and Overgrowth. In 2010 he cofounded Humble Bundle, which was successfully acquired in 2017 and has gone on to raise over $265 million for charity and counting.
Graham has been a member of Indie Fund since 2013 having helped fund titles like Duskers, Tunic, Hyper Light Drifter and Hollow Knight among others. He founded an incubator for video games called Elbow Grease Games (EGG) in 2022. After quietly testing the model for a couple of years, EGG has come out of stealth-mode to publicly evangelize its founding principle: studio funding should be more like startup funding. Prototype funding should be equity based.
EGG is now a growing community of like-minded investors and entrepreneurs who want to foster the next wave of innovation in the gaming industry.
EGG held its own coming out part at a side event at the Olympic Club in San Francisco to introduce founders to investors and publishers and reveal their gaming innovations.
Presenting on stage were:
- Tim Keenan, Creative Director of Misfits Attic
- Ichiro Lambe, CEO Totally Human Media
- Thomas Fossgard, CEO of Free Fall Entertainment
- Tommaso Checchi, CEO of Tomato Cake Inc.
- Tom Kaczmarczyk, CEO of IndieBI
- Karen Laur, CEO of Whenere
- Ata Sergey Nowak, CEO of Torpor Games
- Wouter van Oortmerson, CEO of VoxRay
- Benjamin Devienne, CEO of Onibi
- Tim Soret, CEO of Odd Tales
The descriptions and links to company bio’s founder bio’s and links to relevant media are below:
Misfits Attic by Tim Keenan
After a successful career working for companies like THQ, Dreamworks and Bad Robot, Tim Keenan is rebooting his indie studio and has used EGG funding to craft early playables of the next three games in Misfits Attic’s slate. Here’s the Pre-GDC, teaser trailer that got picked up organically by RPS and PC Gamer. The three games are Scheme, Magic Wizard Chess and Humanity 2.0.
“Magic Wizard Chess is our love letter to chess, roguelikes, dungeon crawlers… it’s the nerdiest game we’ve ever made, and we made a game with a command line interface. We want to give Chess players something exciting, and give non-Chess players a version of Chess they’ll actually like.”
“Scheme is our ‘Littlefinger simulator’, or if you haven’t seen Game of Thrones – just picture your favorite HBO or Netflix series where people are doing shitty things for power. I want to take that fantasy out of television and give each player their own unique story to talk about at the office the next day.”
“Humanity 2.0 is us taking everything we learned from Duskers and putting it into a much fuller experience. While Duskers was about isolation and death, Humanity 2.0 turns that to hope and sacrifice – as you try to reboot humanity after the devastation. We want to give our passionate core audience more of what they love, and draw in a much bigger audience with deeper gameplay and a greater purpose.
Keenan founded an independent game studio that has won over twenty awards, collaborated with acclaimed fantasy author Brandon Sanderson to build captivating worlds, launched a game studio in partnership with JJ Abrams, was published in the book Procedural Storytelling in Game Design, has worked on top grossing animated films at Dreamworks, and contributed to multiple successful triple-A game projects.
Ichiro Lambe co-founded Sony Online Entertainment Denver and founded award-winning indie studio Dejobaan Games. In 2018, Valve approached him to improve discovery for Steam. There, he moonlit to help create Steam Labs, a discovery initiative that now serves the platform’s 130 million users and 100,000+ games.
He founded Totally Human Media and is now working to solve the game discovery problem using generative AI, at a time when game studios are spending billions annually, yet going out of business at alarming rates. The platform is in its early alpha and is called We Love Every Game.
Free Fall Entertainment by Thomas Fossgard
Free Fall Entertainment is a new studio founded by seasoned game developers from the thriving game dev scene of Wrocław, Poland. The company is making its debut with Junkyard, a unique top-down management game that blends retro aesthetics, immersive mechanics, and next-level modding capabilities.
Junkyard is a relaxing top-down management game that promises to bring your evenings back to you. With a dented and charming, ultra-tactile miniature style, the game transports players back to their childhood. Featuring seamless modding and innovative, easy-to-use sharing capabilities, Junkyard allows players to share and modify unique gameplay moments like never before in gaming.
Running a junkyard in the ‘90s was never going to be easy. In a time before widespread safety compliance, players must balance rusty conveyor belts, the demands of far-from-perfect employees, and the outright dangerous junk that passes through their yard—all while trying to make a scrappy profit.
Set in a world brimming with pulp-fiction-like energy, Junkyard features a cast of vibrant characters, from colorful policemen to criminal masterminds, dodgy lawyers, and noisy fax machines straight out of a bygone corporate era.
With emotionally resonant graphics, Junkyard introduces the never-before-seen Diorama Mode, allowing players to capture and share procedural gameplay moments in a stylized miniature format. Combined with built-in modding tools, players can create and share their own custom mini-worlds, pushing the boundaries of creativity and community-driven content.
Founder and creative lead, Thomas Fossgard, brings over two decades of experience in the entertainment industry, having led film productions and game art direction across Norway, China, the UK, and Poland. With Junkyard, he promises a blend of chill, familiar gameplay, a striking visual experience, and powerful narrative elements.
Tomato Cake Inc. by Tommaso Checchi and Coleman Andersen
For the last year, TomatoCake has been working on a game that takes the joy of improv and combines it with a handcrafted 3D story world. They’ve been using AI-powered game characters to make a new kind of game that’s never been possible before– where your main weapon is your own voice.
TomatoCake’s Tommaso Checchi is an industry veteran and was one of the first team members on Minecraft’s mobile edition. He designed creator tools for the Minecraft Marketplace, and spent time working on VR at Meta. Coleman has a background in film, attending NYU Tisch and getting into a handful of Oscar-qualifying film festivals before refocusing on game storytelling.
The team is excited to make an official game announcement later this year.
Wouter van Oortmerssen built his own ray-traced, microvoxel engine from scratch. He is using it to build a game and a multiplayer user-generated content (UGC) platform. EGG invested in the entrepreneur when he saw his ray-traced engine running in full glory at high frames per second on a cheap laptop.
After working on games at Google, EA, Gearbox and Crytek, van Oortmerssen started his own studio to make his vision of a highly buildable, destructable game for world builders come true. Built on an entirely custom microvoxel raytracing engine, the game provides Co-op multiplayer FPS/RPG/Survival gameplay creators can tweak as they see fit. The game comes out of the box with fifteen hours of beautifully designed worlds by the team, full of quests and fun activities. It is already available in Early Access on Steam.
Whenere by Karen Laur and Neal Stephenson
We knew a bit about this as Neal Stephenson, the author of Snow Crash and other sci-fi tales, talked about it at our recent GamesBeat Next 2024 event.
“We’ve worked in virtual worlds and linear stories for a long time, and in Whenere we’ve found a unique way to marry them using AI’” said Karen Laur (Half-Life 1, There.com, Magic Leap) of Whenere, in a statement.
Together with long-time collaborator Stephenson (who coined the term the “metaverse”), Laur is creating a fan-fiction platform that enables writers to tell stories visually in a way unlike anything the world has seen before.
Torpor Games by Ata Sergey Nowak
Ata Sergey Nowak and his team at Torpor Games made the hit title Suzerain which they recently updated on mobile. Their upcoming title The Conformist is an immersive political sandbox which focuses on the art of propaganda as a means to sway the course of nations. Torpor has hit a million installs with Suzerain, and now it is expanding that universe with The Conformist.
Torpor Games offered a look at The Conformist, an ambitious prototype that blends semi-sandbox RPG elements with strategy and simulation mechanics. Staying true to the studio’s signature deep storytelling and moral dilemmas, The Conformist represents a bold evolution beyond the political RPG format, exploring new ways to engage players in complex societal narratives.
Berlin-based Torpor Games is an award-winning studio exploring the human condition through bold political storytelling and immersive mixed-genre experiences. Torpor Games unveiled its latest expansions for its RPG, Suzerain, and is growing Suzerain Universe. With the much-anticipated 3.1 ‘Sovereign’ Update for Kingdom of Rizia and the first look at The Conformist prototype, the Berlin-based studio is charting the future of its thought-provoking, narrative-driven experiences. With a proven track record, Torpor Games is seeking investment to fuel its ambitious roadmap.
Torpor Games’ first expansion, Suzerain: Kingdom of Rizia, proved to be a resounding success in 2024, reaching 350,000 players and achieving an impressive 25% attach rate. Notably, half of all Suzerain sales in 2024 came from the DLC, demonstrating its strong resonance with the community. Building on this momentum, the upcoming 3.1 ‘Sovereign’ Update will introduce new content and refinements, deepening the Kingdom of Rizia experience and reinforcing the studio’s commitment to expanding the Suzerain Universe.
As part of its long-term vision, Torpor Games has introduced Necropolis, a new mobile back-end system designed to enhance player experience and engagement. At its core, Necropolis powers Torpor Accounts, a platform that allows players to store currency, achievements, and other progression data. While currently exclusive to mobile and entirely optional, this system lays the groundwork for future innovations.
The creation of Necropolis stems from a need to offer players a seamless way to preserve their data across devices. While existing solutions are available, building an in-house system gives Torpor Games the flexibility to expand Torpor Accounts with new features, including potential full cross-platform functionality. This strategic move marks a step toward greater independence, fostering a stronger connection with our community while opening the door to future possibilities.
With a string of successes and a growing universe of interconnected titles, Torpor Games is actively seeking investment to accelerate its expansion. From the breakout success of Suzerain to the continued evolution of Kingdom of Rizia and the promising future of The Conformist, the studio is at a pivotal moment, ready to forge new partnerships and bring its vision to a larger global audience.
Odd Tales by Tim Soret
Tim Soret, creator of one of the most successful indie trailers ever, is building Odd Tales Games, a triple-I studio, while crafting The Last Night with his core team—a game awaited by over 470,000+ players on Steam.
The game is like Flashback meets Blade Runner, taking you to the first AI-based civilization at the end of the century, promising a shock like being transported from 1800 to today. Experience a devastating story about letting go of the past, wrapped in a unique visual style that makes pixel art feel like absolute cinema.
IndieBI by Tom Kaczmarczyk and Callum Underwood
IndieBI wants to create the best business copilot for video game companies. IndieBI began as an in-house solution for analyzing and optimizing sales at a self-published games studio.
When founders Tom Kaczmarczyk and Callum Underwood realized its potential to help virtually every PC, console, and VR developer and publisher, they raised support and funding from a group of over 50 industry veterans to spin IndieBI up into the robust platform it is today.
Entirely free to set up, IndieBI automatically collects and analyzes the publishers’ own sales data from Steam, Nintendo Switch, and every major distribution channel. This streamlined approach saves time, supports smarter decision-making, and can directly drive revenue increases in excess of 26% for most games companies.
Today, developers and publishers of all sizes — from fresh solo devs to global double-A publishers grossing tens of millions of dollars a year — rely on IndieBI to track more than $2 billion in annual sales across multiple platforms.
IndieBI’s specialized consulting arm directly manages and optimizes more than $400 million of that revenue for a select roster of top-tier partners, ranging from indie treasures such as Aggro Crab, through wonderful publishers like Panic, all the way to industry icons such as Innersloth. This dedicated team of experts provides comprehensive, data-driven commercial strategy and full end-to-end execution, punching well above their weight and outperforming even the world’s leading publishers.
Having recently launched out of beta, IndieBI is now available free to start for developers and publishers of all shapes and sizes.
Onibi by Benjamin Devienne
Benjamin Devienne is the founder of Onibi. He has worked on 20+ game licenses, including $100 million+ hits. He built and scaled data science at Gameloft, then joined Facebook as head of analytics before moving to Twitch to lead AI research.
Beyond his career, he’s spoken at TEDx and lectured at UdeM and MIT. In 2023, Onibi secured a $6.5 million seed round with investors like Sequoia (Scout), Octopus Ventures, and backers from his previous company, including Makers Fund, YC, and Kirbi. Now he is making a game called Tomo: Endless Blue.
Endless Blue is an ocean realm inhabited by mysterious creatures known as the Tomo. Team up with your companions to fight, or simply enjoy daily life. Build vehicles and contraptions out of blocks to explore procedurally generated islands and villages, and meet unique characters along the way.
The game features AI-driven living worlds with maps, architecture, villages, NPCs, cultures, quests, and entire stories fully procedurally generated—offline. It also has n️etworked voxel physics. Unlike Minecraft’s static blocks, Onibi’s engine is more like Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. Build a boat out of blocks, set sail with friends. Tomo serve as companions – they’re real agents that can terraform, interact, and live in the world. Your Tomo adapts—exploring, battling, or just chilling in its own cozy home.
And it has terrain-based ARPG combat. You can switch between your POV and your Tomo creature. Use terrain and blocks strategically to gain the upper hand. Spread water to cool down a fire Tomo, then target the water with an electric attack for massive damage. It’s all dynamic.
