MegaGrants: the process
I originally wrote this out 3 years ago, but I figured I’d copy it here so it’s more accessible for me to link to people:
When we first applied back in March, I was trying to scour the internet to find as much information as I could about past grants and the new MegaGrants to help ease my anxiety but there wasn't a lot going around outside of "we got it!" and "we didn't get it!" So, I thought to kind of put together a bullet point of what it's been like.
We submitted a link to our website, a trailer as a YT link, and a playable build via Google Drive. The character limit puts quite a squeeze on how much you can actually talk about your project and what you'll use the money for. I wish I could tell everyone what I wrote but I don't remember, it was probably along the lines of "we really want to make this happen but to do so we need to work on it full-time and the grant would help"
The playable build was playable in the technical sense, but it had no player on boarding and very little content. I'm going to give a guess that if it was downloaded and opened at all, it was to see if the trailer was a complete lie or not, since the build was difficult to play through without coaching
The trailer was our first ever trailer, so it wasn't that good. You can watch it here to see where the game was when we submitted: https://youtu.be/2TG51odxcfA We also posted the trailer on the forums in WIP and it was featured in a community spotlight - I'm not sure whether or not having people outside the grant team know about it changes anything, though
The game website was visited once from what seemed to be from Epic's Salesforce. This was about 2~ weeks before we got our congratulations email. I'm pretty sure they didn't visit it before then, and I'm glad because it wasn't that great...
We're pretty active on Twitter and the UE Twitter and few community managers were aware of our project, and we've hastagged tweets with UE4 before. Like above, I'm not sure if awareness of your project outside the grant team helps, but...probably?
I have 0 evidence to say that they look at the progress you've made since submission but I'd like to say it was definitely a factor. Our game changed a lot since March! We were so worried about the quality of the initial stuff we submitted we were heavily considering resubmitting before they even got back to us
We received an email about 97~ days after our submission saying that the team was working through submissions and would need more time
There was about 3 months between the "need more time" email and our notice
Once we received the email, it was very easy to get in touch with Epic and to ask questions. They reply extremely quickly and were friendly about answering my questions like "does this bank routing information look right??"
I hope this information helps or eases your grant-submitting anxieties! As far as I know, you're welcome to resubmit projects that were denied - if it shows strong progress in the right direction, it could be a plus. Other than that, the entire process was just a lot of waiting and biting nails ): I'm sure as the grant gets more attention and more apply, the time between emails can get much longer, but with the Mega Grant I've heard at least they'll email you if it was denied, and they do give you "hold on we're still evaluating" heads up.
Anyways, I posted our project on this subreddit when we first started, when it was a hobby project. It had good feedback, so we kept going. I would've never imagined we'd be able to work full-time on a game! The UE community has been extremely supportive and helpful, including the staff at Epic and all the resources and events they hold for indies. Thank you!
