Eligibility and assessment
Read against the published guidelines for the Emerging Gamemakers Fund, round closing 5pm AEST Thursday 27 August 2026.
This document is the cold-eyed one: what the fund asks, what we can prove, and where we are weak.
Eligibility
| Requirement | Status |
|---|---|
| Australian citizen or permanent resident (individual), or an incorporated company carrying on business in Australia with central management and control in Australia | Met |
| Holds an ABN | Met |
| GST-registered if legally required | Met |
| Controls all rights necessary to make the game; clear chain of title | Met — original IP, no licensed assets, no third-party characters. All contractor agreements assign or licence deliverables to the applicant. |
| Project budget not exceeding $500,000 at time of application | Met — total project budget is well under six figures |
| Request of no more than $30,000 | Met — requesting the full $30,000 |
| Not a project with an existing playable prototype seeking completion funding at production scale | See note below |
The prototype question, answered honestly. A playable build exists and is public. The fund distinguishes prototype creation from micro-scale completion and release, and funds both. We are applying against the second: completion and release of a micro-scale game. The existing build is the evidence, not the deliverable — it de-risks the application rather than disqualifying it, and it is why the budget below has no discovery phase in it.
Assessment criteria
1. Creative merit — originality, experimentation, and how well it is communicated
The experiment is a specific one: can two players be funny to each other with no communication channel except food? No chat, no voice, no emotes. The comedy is generated by the gap between what one person meant and what the other person received, and the mechanics exist only to widen that gap.
Formally, three things are unusual:
- Asymmetric information comedy where the tools are symmetric and only the knowledge differs
- A HUD that lives on the live 3D bench rather than on a separate screen, making attention itself the scarce resource — claim another ticket mid-plate and the physics throws your work at the walls
- Procedural comedy generated entirely on device from a date seed, so every player everywhere shares the same absurd menu at zero cost
See 01-core-insight.
2. Viability — realistic scope, feasible budget, fair pay
- The riskiest technical work is already done and public. Multiplayer sync, 3D assembly, the procedural generator, the audio synthesis and the CRT rendering all exist in the playable build.
- Scope is fixed and small. One kitchen, one loop, two roles, no roadmap. Nothing in the plan requires a new system to be invented.
- Running cost is architecturally zero — a free-tier realtime database, static hosting, no runtime AI, no media uploads. A micro-game that cannot go bankrupt by being popular.
- Everyone is paid. Contract artist and contract audio designer at standard Australian day rates, itemised in 08-production-plan.
3. Impact — on our practice, and on the Australian games landscape
On practice: it is the first release of a two-person studio's own IP, and the first thing we can hand someone as a link rather than a pitch deck.
On the landscape: the transferable output is the architecture. A live, multiplayer, zero-account, zero-cost web game is a pattern almost no Australian micro-studio uses, because the received wisdom is that multiplayer means servers and servers mean money. We will publish the architecture, the free-tier budget maths and the sync layer openly at release. That is a public good disproportionate to a $30,000 grant.
4. Equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility
Covered in full in 04-access-and-inclusion. In short: no account, no install, no data collected, plays on a library computer and a five-year-old phone, every action keyboard-reachable, nothing conveyed by colour alone, fully playable muted, and a comedy whose target is the franchise rather than the worker.
Where we are weak
Stated plainly, because an assessor will find them anyway.
| Weakness | What we are doing about it |
|---|---|
| No prior commercial release | The prototype is public and playable now — the work speaks before the CV does |
| Two-player-only games have a cold-start problem | An always-open public room, plus a single-player mode where the seeded generator plays the diner |
| Comedy is unfalsifiable in a written application | The application is accompanied by a live build and today's real generated menu, not a description of one |
| Free-to-play with no revenue model | Correct. This is a micro-scale portfolio and practice project, not a business case, and the fund is the right instrument for exactly that |
Materials
- Live playable build (URL in the application)
- Creative pitch deck, on the Screen Australia template
- Project plan and budget, on the Screen Australia template
- These docs, as the working evidence behind both