Loftia was easily one of the biggest MMOs to fund on Kickstarter last year: The self-described “mediumly multiplayer” sandbox pulled in $1.27M US for Australian outfit Qloud. And it’s apparently pulled in more than that, if the game’s latest message to players through Kickstarter is any indication.
Qliyd says its dev staff have been tapped by venture capital group a16z for games-acceleration workshop Speedrun, accompanied by a blast of investment it characterizes as “a pre-seed investment from a16z, which will be going directly towards Loftia’s continued development” on which the team, which has temporarily relocated to California to participate, will “retain complete creative freedom to continue building Loftia.”
“To give some additional context, a16z reached out to us in August last year whilst our Kickstarter campaign was in full flight, and we applied for SPEEDRUN just two weeks after our campaign ended,” Qloud writes. “This meant we had to put together a game demo in a much shorter timeframe than expected, in addition to many rounds of interviews with the a16z team.”
The rest of the blog talks up the addition of two more game designers to the indie team, efforts toward filling out the core gameplay loop and progression, and prototyping everything from weather and gliding to interfaces and recycling (this is a solarpunk title, after all).
