Field Notes from the Lone Pine Dev Team — Devlog #6 | Bang Bang Bang Interactive

Lone Pine is a narrative indie adventure game about hiking down a mysterious mountain filled with cryptids, puzzles, and emotional storytelling. In our sixth monthly devlog, we talk about an exciting new announcement.

Funding Announcement

We were fortunate enough to receive a grant from Screen Australia to put towards the development of Lone Pine! Hooray! This is a huge deal for us. As Lone Pine is a passion project, we’re excited to be able to dedicate more time to the game. Production is moving faster than ever and we’ll have some exciting new stuff to show soon.

Advice on Applying for Games Grants in Australia

(Guy who’s gotten one single grant in his entire life voice) Okay here’s how you get a grant.

Or at least here’s some advice for applying. This is what we’ve learned not just from our successful attempt, but all of our many unsuccessful ones. There’s been a lot of feedback, asking questions, seeking advice, reviewing, crying. So much crying.

When we go to events, we meet a lot of recently graduated students who studied game design, and a lot of people with full-time jobs working in game studios. Doing indie game dev part-time is also very common, but we don’t see as many people with established careers in adjacent industries moving into games. Animation, art/graphic design, music, and software development. But they’re definitely around, and becoming more common.

There are dozens of us. Dozens!

From this perspective, trying to break in with no real games to our name, no credits, and no degree in game design or any industry connections has been tricky despite more than a decade of transferable skills. And fair enough, there are so many talented people putting out amazing games.

So what’s our advice for applying for games grants in Australia? Well, if you’re the type of person to read this, you’re probably already in the top tier of applicants, of which there are many.

Pie graphs from Screen Australia showing state breakdown of Games Production Fund applications across three rounds: February 2025, August 2025, and March 2026, illustrating a rise in the number of submissions.

Games Production Fund stats from Screen Australia showing a rise in the number of applications

This blog post won’t cover everything, so read the published documents put out by the Screen Agencies on their websites. These straight-up tell you what strong applications do. So go through every single bullet point and do all those things, and if you can’t do one of them, explain why or how you’ll compensate for it.

Think of it like applying for a job: if you don’t have direct experience in that kind of role, focus on what transferable skills you have. Or you can think of it like writing an assignment: read the marking criteria and show with as many sources as you can how you meet it. They also have great templates on their websites for most of the documents you’ll need - use them!

I won’t recount the entire assessment criteria, but a previous games assessor for a screen agency gave this advice:

“The main thing I want to be able to do is to be able to picture what this game will actually be like to play. That doesn't just mean mechanics and genre, but a clear sense of style and the moment-to-moment. Information (whether that's a prototype, pitch deck, whatever) that lets me go, yep, I can see what this game is going to be.

Next is general feasibility. Do the details match up between your application and your budget etc? Does it look like you know what you are actually doing, the work involved, the risks, etc? Do I feel confident giving this big bag of cash to this person instead of someone else? Does it actually sound original and interesting or like cookie-cutter mechanics cut and paste…

But essentially: detail, novelty, style, feasibility is what I want to see as an assessor.”

Also, get some letters of recommendation to include in your application. If you don’t know anyone in the industry who will give you one, get whoever will be your strongest and can show they know you’re reliable and can deliver a project. On repeated applications, include a summary of what’s changed and what’s new since your last one. At the time of writing, most screen agencies only let you apply for a grant for the same game twice.

If you have the skills (and time), make a pitch video if it’s not already required. Each assessor is different, but I have been told some tend to watch this as the first thing when opening a new application. For that reason you might also want to make it a bit different if you’ve applied in a previous round. This is also why a summary of what’s new since last time is important. If they’ve seen your game before, it’s good to guide the assessor to what you really want them to know - how far you’ve come!

If you’ve never shipped a game, try to have a demo on Steam or a free game on Itch. And do your play-testing build via Steam to show you’re familiar with how all that works. They want to be confident the person they’re giving taxpayer money to knows what the hell they’re doing.

This is a weird and also dumb detour but stick with me: Years ago, Amazon made a documentary following an NFL team for their entire season called “All or Nothing”. Season 1 is definitely worth a watch, even if you don’t care that much about American football, but there’s one part that I often think about.

The coach, Bruce Arians, makes an offhand comment about how the Cardinals are going to win the game. A single play in the NFL is complicated and involves a lot of moving parts and moving people with precise timing. He said that it’s not always about one player making a big flashy hail mary, it’s more often about making sure everything is correct, or as he said: “It’s not about who makes the play, it’s about who doesn’t **** it up.” A single foot out of place can draw a penalty that sets you back and loses the game.

I apply this advice to a lot of things in my life, including (for better or worse) writing a grant application. When an assessor is reading your materials, any lingering questions or doubts are players that are out of place. You need to make sure everyone is where they’re meant to be, and you do this by cutting off these questions as they come up by addressing them yourself first, even if that’s just saying “Yeah we don’t have X, Y, Z, but what we plan to do instead is…”

It’s not only about knocking them dead with a high quality game and pitch, it’s also about showing your work and making sure you've dotted your i’s and crossed your t’s. That’s how you avoid getting yelled at by Bruce Arians.

Photo of NFL coach Bruce Arians on the sideline, referenced in the context of making sure every detail of a grant application is airtight.

He’s so scary. What were we talking about again?

Also, talk about your long-term goals and what you want to give back. Be part of your local game dev community. Of course, you should do this anyway, because there’s always so much to learn and so many great people to meet. We just returned from a trip to Melbourne for Melbourne International Games Week. It was inspiring to see so many great Australian indie games, and to see a lot of representation from Queensland! It’s so satisfying to catch up with your friends and see how their careers are growing and their games are getting better and better.

What’s Next

It feels like we’re always saying this, but we’ll have more exciting announcements soon, and a more definitive timeline for release. In the meantime, as a little preview, here are some toes.

A mysterious close-up teaser image from Lone Pine.

We said we’d leave you with some toes. We are nothing if not people of our word.

We’ll also have a brand new trailer being featured in the inaugural Point & Click Showcase, co-organised by Rusty Lake and Amanita Design! You can check it out next week. Here’s the trailer for the showcase:

Until next time!