Announcing Hooded Horse as Our Publisher for Kinstrife

Hi everyone,

It’s been a while since we’ve shared a big update so we’re extremely happy to finally announce what we’ve been working towards for a while:

Kinstrife will be published by Hooded Horse!

Additionally, we’re also very excited and grateful to share that Kinstrife will be supported with additional funding from the German games grant (Games-Förderung des Bundes) from the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space.

What this means

All of this is happening as Kinstrife moves into the next phase of development. With Hooded Horse we now have a level of support and stability we could have only dreamt of when we started this project a long time ago.

The project is now fully funded, which means we can now dedicate ourselves entirely to developing the game. It also gives us the resources to continue expanding the team, to a degree that we previously would have only dreamed of. We will be able to have a team of dedicated experts across all areas of development, which puts us into a great position to achieve the features and gameplay we have all been wanting.

Just as importantly, Hooded Horse brings a great deal of experience and dedication across production, QA, marketing, community management and many other aspects. Their involvement helps ensure the game can reach players in the best possible shape, while allowing us to stay focused on what we do best: developing Kinstrife itself.

This stability, team scale and support allows us to pursue the full vision we have for Kinstrife. Building a game of this scope would have been very difficult for a tiny indie team without funding or support. And now with Hooded Horse in our corner, plus the funding support from the German games grant, we’re in the best possible position to achieve our full ambition.

How we got here

Our journey into game development started as modders, when we decided we wanted to build our dream game. We experimented constantly; prototyping, building small mechanics and learning as we went, teaching ourselves programming, art and design, gradually figuring out what worked and what didn’t.

What emerged from all that tinkering was a clear vision: we love creating intricate systems grounded in reality; systems that offer interaction, depth and meaningful choices. But just as importantly, many games that have stayed with us over the years are the ones that felt grounded, relatable, and with memorable characters; games with a human touch.

After our announcement trailer (which is how many of you found Kinstrife), we started planning what it would take to bring this game to its full potential. We soon realized that if we wanted to bring our full vision to life, we needed the help of a publisher with a keen sense (“Fingerspitzengefühl”) for the genre, and knew how to support an indie team building something unique and ambitious. From very early on, Hooded Horse stood out. We'd been following their work with games like Manor Lords and saw how they gave developers the support and freedom to build the games they actually wanted to make.

From then on, our focus was clear: preparing the studio for the possibility of a partnership like this.. Even though you didn’t hear much from us in recent months, we were hard at work developing, and securing a grant from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg (which we’re also very grateful for!), and laying the groundwork for this collaboration.

Today, we're excited to officially announce that it’s happening: we're partnering with Hooded Horse to bring Kinstrife to its full potential.