Oi flatmates!
Last week, we secretly flew to Seongnam (South Korea) to attend the Neowiz Indie Quest award ceremony, the first edition of an international contest dedicated to emerging narrative excellence, without publishers or funding.
It is with full hearts that we announce we placed first and won a prize of $70,000 -- which, all things considered, represents the first real batch of funding in four full years of development.
NEOWIZ describes the contest as “a project designed to discover promising indie games from around the world and provide creators with a practical development environment. In particular, it was created to support the development capabilities of studios working on high-quality IPs that combine creative worldviews with dense narratives.
Over the past nine months, more than 600 indie development teams from Korea, the United States, China, and other countries have taken part in the competition”.
Now, it’s undeniable that a sum like this isn’t enough to cover the full development of GLASSHOUSE, but for the first time, we have capital we can invest into the project, both in the short and long term.
In the interest of transparency, we want to clearly outline how the prize will impact development:
Establishing FLAT28 as a company
While FLAT28 will remain a remote studio (all 25 members are spread across Italy, the UK, Colombia, and the United States), we’ve decided to formally incorporate -- this will allow us to operate within European legal frameworks, apply for government grants, and, eventually, begin paying the development team.
This is a necessary step to become more “serious” and “reliable” in the eyes of publishers and investors, as well as a statement of intent to you -- and to ourselves.
Kickstarter Demo & Campaign
Over the past months, we’ve often hinted at the possibility of a Kickstarter -- now we’re making it official. We plan to launch a crowdfunding campaign by the end of 2026.
No temporary playtests this time: we will release a brand-new demo on Steam, and it will remain available there until the full game launches.
The Neowiz prize will therefore be primarily used to support the Kickstarter campaign and enhance the demo, through partial voice acting and additional localizations (too early to announce specifics). No compromises; we aim to release a demo polished to the best of our abilities, feature-complete, and offering over three hours of content.
We’ll share more details in the future, but the goal is to place in your hands a product worthy of your trust(and patience).
That’s all for today: as a reminder, later this month we’ll be releasing a new Devlog on YouTube, where we’ll dive deeper into writing and worldbuilding, as well as share our incredible experience in South Korea.
See ya soon, flatmates!
– Giacomo Montagnoli, Creative Director, FLAT28 Collective