Ant Workshop, the BAFTA-nominated games studio based in Edinburgh, has secured a significant financial investment that will enable the development of new titles, including one it hopes to bring to market next year.聽聽聽聽
Chroma Ventures, the investment arm of Dundee-based 4J Studios, has invested a seven-figure sum in Ant Workshop, which will allow the independent firm to devote more time and resource to developing Dungeon Golf, a concept the team recently created.聽
Ant Workshop was founded in 2015 by Tony Gowland. A games designer with more than 20 years鈥� experience, he had held senior positions at Rockstar鈥疓ames 鈥� where he worked on major global hits like Grand Theft Auto: Stories鈥痵eries and Red Dead Redemption 鈥� and鈥疉ctivisionBlizzard, which Microsoft agreed to acquire this month for $70bn.聽
Gowland鈥檚 vision for his own studio, which celebrates seven years in business this month, was to鈥痜ocus on developing original intellectual property聽 with a quirky sense of humour.聽聽聽
Ant Workshop’s first title was Binaries, a BAFTA-nominated puzzle鈥痯latform game, which was followed by the Scottish summertime simulator Taps Aff, and most recently the Apple鈥疉rcade launch title Dead End Job, a 1990s cartoon-style shooter game.聽
As well as developing its own games, Gowland鈥檚 team has brought more than a dozen other titles to鈥痗urrent and next generation console platforms.聽聽聽
Gowland will recruit two new full-time employees and additional freelance talent to supplement his existing team of eight developers, whose combined experience extends to more than 40 video game titles. Ant Workshop received a grant from the UK Games Fund last year to develop a prototype of Dungeon Golf, in which minotaurs, goblins, and other mythical creatures compete with one another.聽聽
The investment from Chroma Ventures will see its principals, Paddy Burns and Chris van der Kuyl, join Ant Workshop鈥檚 board as directors. In 2005, Burns and van der Kuyl founded Dundee-based game developer 4J Studios, which is best known for developing Minecraft for Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo games consoles.聽聽聽
鈥淚鈥檓 incredibly excited for the future and what Ant Workshop will be able to achieve with Chroma鈥疺entures鈥� investment,鈥� said Gowland.聽
鈥淚t not only allows our team to focus exclusively on making鈥痮ur new IP and games the very best they can be, but鈥痚nables us to tap into the vast experience Chris and Paddy bring, both in terms of developing games and businesses.聽聽聽
鈥淭he idea for Dungeon Golf stemmed from a family holiday and watching my six-year-old daughter playing mini-golf with my mum. It struck me that a game like that is a great leveller in that everyone understands the basic concept and regardless of age or ability you can all have fun playing together.聽
鈥淲e then started to imagine how some of the classic characters found in dungeon crawler games would perform on a golf course and quickly realised we could have a lot of fun mashing the two worlds together.聽聽
鈥淚f a game is designed well and genuinely family-friendly, there鈥檚 no reason it can鈥檛 bridge the generations and bring people together in a way that is fun and appealing for all.聽
鈥淚f we get this right, I鈥檇 love to develop a series with different variations on the theme over the next few years.鈥�