Lunacy Games, the independent studio founded by award-winning game industry veteran Bill Roper, today announced a new partnership with Big Bang Accelerator (BBX) and the close of a $500,000 development funding round to bring their ambitious debut title, Innsmouth Mysteries, to life.
Born from a team of veteran creators behind some of gaming’s most iconic worlds, Lunacy
Games is on a mission to reinvent what it means to play together by crafting co-op adventures that celebrate creativity, camaraderie, and storytelling through dynamic environments and emergent play.
“Our studio thrives on the magic that happens when friends unite to face the unknown,”
said Bill Roper, CEO and cofounder of Lunacy Games. “We’re building a culture that’s
collaborative and driven by a love for great games and the people that play them.”
The newly secured funding will power the creation of a vertical slice for Innsmouth Mysteries, a third-person cooperative horror extraction RPG that invites players into a race against a vast cosmic terror. Set in a mysterious 1920s seaside town, supernatural investigators must uncover the truth, gather arcane artifacts, and prevent an ancient evil from awakening before the clock strikes midnight.
“We knew immediately that BBX was the right partner for us,” Roper continued. “Their
commitment to the double-A space, where creativity meets craftsmanship, makes them an ideal ally for us to create Innsmouth Mysteries.”
“Lunacy Games has a clear and compelling vision for a co-op horror extraction RPG, and it’s backed by a team of veterans whose track record speaks for itself,” said Ying Sha, co-founder of BBX. “We are proud to support studios like theirs that are pushing the boundaries of games. We see Innsmouth Mysteries as a project that perfectly aligns with our mission to support talented teams to bring high-quality, deeply engaging experiences to players.”
Roper sees this partnership as a rallying cry for studios and games caught between two worlds: “The industry has been split between triple-A blockbusters and indie titles,” he said. “We believe there’s a vast, underserved middle ground that’s keenly desired by players. A place for exciting gameplay combined with deep, immersive, story-rich experiences. We’re excited to have this opportunity to take the first, vital step with Innsmouth Mysteries on a journey to deliver that kind of game.”
Lunacy Games is an independent studio crafting cooperative adventures that spark imagination and connection. With a focus on creativity, community, and emergent storytelling, the studio brings together seasoned developers led by Bill Roper, alongside co-founders Nick Newhard and Geoff Tuffli — veterans of the MMO, RPG, FPS, and Action genres. The founders have spent hundreds of hours playing survival games together. And that shaped their tastes.
Lunacy Games is a remote-first studio headquartered in Washington. Roper said the team sticks to normal hours and doesn’t burn itself out with lots of hours in a given week.
Getting the funding
I mentioned it was nice to see good news after so much tough news.
“No kidding, man. The last three years, It’s just been body blow after body blow. And just like such challenging time, and even this week, just watching the news go by and seeing studios laying people off,” Roper said.
Roper said it took a long time to get the funding. The company started looking at the end of 2022 and found that everything had changed in games in 2023. It was suddenly very though to get any funding. Roper’s previous company, AuthorDigital, also cycled through a lot of pitches and funding efforts only to shut down.
But this time, someone that Roper had met 15 years ago posted on LinkedIn about joining an accelerator, and Roper pinged the man and set up a meeting with Big Bang Accelerator. Then they started talking about a deal and it took a few months. That was a relief for Roper after three tough years of looking for money.
Roper said the money from BBX will be for the team to build a vertical slice for Innsmouth Mysteries. That means it will be a scene from the game that will be playable and give people an idea of what the gameplay will be like — and hopefully leaving them wanting to play more. Roper said he found that such slices are table stakes for getting money now.
And so after the company builds the vertical slice, it will likely go out and try to raise more money for the complete game.
“This is such a huge challenge for studios to go from that kind of zero to even 0.5 to get that in place,” Roper said. “You get in a real Catch-22 because you go to talk to people to get funding so you can start building something, but they want you to have already built something before they give you funding. It’s an unforgiving industry, but I am happy to be working in it.”
The tough thing about a vertical slice, Roper said, is that investors say they want that perfect piece of cake so they understand what the whole cake will be like. But you don’t have to make me a whole cake. The challenge is it is an awful lot of work, he said.
Big Bang Accelerator’s philosophy is to take talented teams with great ideas and get them from concept to vertical slice, Roper said. They’re focused on the double-A space, which is where Lunacy Games is focused.
“They’re very focused on PC and consoles, and very clear in their ideals on not only the kind of companies they want to work with, but the kind of games they want to get made,” said Roper. “It’s a unique space as they’re focused on in a part where others are not.”
Roper and his founders had built a concept and demo for a game called Skinwalkers, set in the “weird West” as a “cowboys vs Chtulhu” game. It was a double-A project for PCs and consoles with cross-play that could have used a $15 million to $20 million development budget. But he found no one was funding that level of project right now.
“We pivoted and thought we could do a more focused and refined game, something we could more quickly and less expensively,” he said. “And we shifted genres.”
Now the company is working on a third-person co-op horror RPG where the object is extraction. The extraction genre is usually a player-versus-player game with skill-based shooting and harsh penalties when you lose. But Lunacy Games’ title is going in the direction of being for broader audiences. It’s also adding a “cosmic horror” angle with supernatural investigation.
“We really tapped into the lore that those like H.P. Lovecraft had written about the setting, Innsmouth, which is a town in Massachusetts,” Roper said.
It’s based on a novella by Lovecraft that is called Shadow Over Innsmouth. It’s not focused on gore or jump scares. But it does have an extraction mechanic that makes it exciting.
“Our story takes place before that story, and it imagines what may have come before the events that occurred that led to how Innsmouth was in the Lovecraft story,” Roper said. “We are not basing it on what he had done, but we really liked the setting. It’s more about cosmic dread that sits over you. It’s a kind of slipping of your sanity, with things that I think are very much rooted in a lot of Lovecraft Stories.”
The team started with a trio of people at the outset, and it expanded and contracted to around five. Now it has 13 people. Roper said he is CEO but he’s also working on audio development.
“It’s nice to be in a startup. Everybody’s got to get in there and get their hands dirty,” he said. “That’s super exciting.”
The company operates virtually and the team is spread out.
Big Bang Accelerator (BBX) is an early-stage investor with broad interest in the game industry and related fields. BBX has an acceleration program to support early game teams with critical talent and skills to grow and deliver outstanding games.
BBX operates internationally with a focus of bridging talented regional developers and the worldwide market. Cofounders and partners at BBX bring extensive game industry experience and network to add extra value beyond just funding. BBX is affiliated with HT Investment.
BBX has a small, tight management team on the fund.
“I was a little astonished and really excited about how quickly we moved,” Roper said
Roper’s long career
It’s hard to hear that Roper had some doubts in recent years because he had such a hard time getting funded. But he’s had a huge career.
He started in 1994 as employe No. 17 at Blizzard. He got to work on the first Warcraft, Orcs & Humans, StarCraft and Diablo.
Then he left with David Brevik and Erik and Max Schaefer to start Flagship Studios. That team worked on Hellgate: London and went on for five years. He worked on the MMOs Champions Online, Star Trek Online, and the beginnings of Neverwinter at Cryptic Studios for a couple of years. He took a year off for family reasons and then went to Disney. There, he worked on Disney Infinity, a big toys-to-life game. Then he shifted to Improbable for two years in London and returned to the U.S. in 2019. He tried to work with AuthorDigital, raising money for a couple of demos but ultimately failing to raise rounds to compete the games.
“We built some really cool demos. And it got close a couple times in terms of actually having a deal to make something. But failures happen a lot in the startup world,” he said. “We couldn’t quite get it to happen, Roper said.
Then Roper started Lunacy Games. To those who are having a tough time and failing, he said it’s important to recognize that “it’s not you” when it comes to the problems. Rather, it is the way of the global economy and how scarce funding in games has become.
“It’s not you. It’s the way the global economy is going. And that gets hard to believe when you get a lot of rejections,” he said. “I came to realize it wasn’t me. It wasn’t our studio. It is an incredibly challenging time right now to get money.”
Still, he saw that you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. He said that the funding person who came through was someone he met 15 years ago.
“Persistence is key,” he said. “We found out what people were willing to fund. We had to pivot. That concept of pivoting and failing fast got ingrained in our minds.”