Calgary game studio start-up The Foundation took a small team and a big idea to claim second place at Indie Ignition last December. By June their art had claimed another big award at GameCon Canada. Now there’s a funding offer on the table and growing interest from big publishers. The Foundation's rise says as much about Calgary as it does about the game.
Six weeks before Calgary studio The Foundation showed its game at GameCon Canada in Edmonton, director Russel Schultz messaged his team at ten o'clock at night with an idea: strip the game's comic-book world down to black and white, and let colour do the work: marking special abilities, guiding the player, replacing menus and health bars to create a more seamless experience of its world. It also kept the scope of the project more manageable.
The gamble paid off. Sin and Sorrow (developed under the working title Project Visceral) is a stripped-down, high-octane action game built by a six-person team in their spare time. Up against 42 showcased projects, the Calgary-based team took home one of five awards at the June event in Edmonton. Press coverage followed, the studio received its first formal funding offer, along with follow-up conversations with multiple established publishers.
Schultz traces the momentum to Indie Ignition, Bow Valley College's digital entertainment accelerator, where The Foundation placed second overall and claimed the top cash prize at the program's pitch competition in December 2025.
"Indie Ignition has honestly been the most fundamental piece of our journey so far," says Schultz. "I was just surprised at how in-depth the program was, and how many real industry people and connections we got out of it."
Where many accelerators run pitches over video calls, Indie Ignition put teams on a stage in front of industry judges. "It's the only one where we got to actually pitch to real industry people, in person," Schultz says. "That has paid dividends for us."
The prize money went into distinctly unglamorous places: legal work, banking, documentation, and studio-owned technical infrastructure. It’s the foundational plumbing of a company built to last.
"We want to be the premier game dev studio in Calgary," he says.
That's the outcome the program is built for, says Ryan Coutts, Digital Entertainment Accelerator Lead at Bow Valley College. Over 12 weeks, mentors from game development, esports, marketing, and legal backgrounds help participants tighten their focus — and identify what they don't yet know.
"At the end of this program, the companies that have gone through it are more ready to hit the ground running and keep moving forward with their businesses,” says Coutts.
The accelerator is funded in part through the Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund, and demand is outpacing capacity — more than 150 applicants competed for spots in the 2025 program across esports, film, and game development streams. Stories like The Foundation's are the return on that investment.
Canada is one of the world's game development powerhouses, but the industry has traditionally been concentrated in Montreal, Vancouver, and Toronto. Calgary trains excellent technical talent— then watches much of it leave.
"There is so much passion and opportunity in Calgary's creative industries, and we're thrilled to see these businesses take off," says Coutts. Schultz believes the breakout is close. "It's crazy how close Calgary is," he says. "Within probably a year or two, if we keep getting support, it'll happen for sure."
The Foundation plans to enter full production in September, with a possible additional international showings later this year. "Indie Ignition really set us up for success and helped us bridge a lot of very tangible gaps," Schultz says. "When I look back on everything, that was the big turning point for us."
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