Indie Fund-ed dev thechineseroom has released a stunning new trailer for Dear Esther, showing just how far Dan Pinchbeck & Robert Briscoe have pushed their vision. Do yourself a favor & watch it in HD via the Dear Esther website here

Further, thechineseroom have announced that Dear Esther will launch via Steam on February 14th.

Lastly, Dear Esther is the most nominated game in the IGF 2012, having garnered noms for: Excellence In Visual Art, Excellence In Audio, The Nuovo Award & The Seamus McNally Grand Prize. This is a huge feat for thechineseroom, and we’re extremely happy for them.

We are happy to announce that Q.U.B.E., the first Indie Fund-ed game to market, took only 4 days on Steam to generate enough revenue for Toxic Games to repay the full investment amount of $90k. As previously promised, we aim to be as transparent as possible with all our investment work, so we’d like to provide everyone with a brief recap of how things unfolded in this case.

Toxic originally pitched Q.U.B.E. to us in late August of 2010 with an estimated budget of $42k. We approved the game for funding about 2 months later.

Back then we had a two stage approval system. We would first vote on whether to continue investigating the project, and then collected budget and schedule information for a final vote the following month. Since we only have one call per month, the approval process took too long. We’ve since changed this to a single vote system where we vote whether to fund a game on the first partner call after they were submitted. That means a typical turnaround time of up to a month instead of up to 2 months.

With other games we were funding, we found that sending a developer a check every month to cover their expenses wasn’t working very well. It was a headache for us, and monthly build-based payments felt too publisher-y, and somewhat disrespectful to the developer. In short, it felt icky, so with Q.U.B.E. we decided to take a different approach and pay 50% of the total investment amount up front, and the other 50% when the first half was close to running out.

We sent the team their first payment of $21k in October 2010, and the second half (also $21k) was sent in January 2011. At that point it became clear that the game would run over budget, and it did, so we decided to provide Toxic two more payments totaling $47.5k. We are very happy that we were able to fully fund the game, as it was important to us, and to Toxic’s future as independent developers, that the team shipped the best game they could.

In the short time that it’s been available on Steam, Q.U.B.E. has sold over 12,000 copies. As such, Indie Fund recouped its investment in Q.U.B.E., and now we’re looking forward to seeing what the future holds for Toxic Games. Our goal is to help developers get and stay independent and it will take some time to see if we’ve achieved it. With the investment already paid off and discussions in progress about bringing Q.U.B.E beyond PC, we’re feeling pretty hopeful.

Our heartfelt congratulations to Toxic Games. We’re proud to have played a small role in what has already been a great success.

It’s official! We just started funding our 4th project, Dear Esther.

Dear Esther is the brainchild of Dan Pinchbeck.  It was initially released in 2008 as a Half-Life mod and immediately developed a cult following.  It also garnered a lot of attention in game design circles for expanding what is possible within the medium of games.

In its new incarnation, Dear Esther is being visually re-imagined by Robert Briscoe, previously an Environment Artist on Mirror’s Edge. Voice acting and musical score, which were superb to begin with, are also being redone to make sure the experience lives up to Dan’s full vision for it.

We are backing Dear Esther because it is a unique expression from a video game artist we look forward to seeing more work from in the future. Dear Esther also stands out in that it is a mod-turned-indie-game, something that would have been unlikely to get traditional publisher funding, even if it were a more standard gaming experience.

If you’d like to read more about this project, Kris Graft has an interview about Dear Esther with Dan Pinchbeck and Ron Carmel up on gamasutra.

Best of luck to you and your team, Dan!

PS: We still have money sitting in the bank waiting for the right projects, so keep your submissions coming, we’re not done yet!

We are happy to announce that we are currently funding three teams, two of which will likely release their games this year! We’ve only committed half our funds so far, by the way, so please keep the submissions coming, we’re still looking for interesting projects to invest in.

While we’re not quite ready to reveal the three funded games, we will do so at GDC during a panel we are putting together for the Independent Games Summit. The panel will be comprised of Indie Fund partners and representatives from each of the three funded teams. It’ll focus on the experience of operating Indie Fund (from our perspective) and working with Indie Fund (from the developers’ perspective).

Around the same time we will also be making our funding terms public in the hope that will provide developers some sort of measuring stick to hold up to other funding offers they get.

See you all at GDC!