Earlier this year, Epic Games announced that it would be giving out grants to worthy developers using Unreal Engine 4 for their games, and today the North Carolina-based studio has announced three new winners, bringing the number of to nine with grants totalling $139,000 so far.

“There’s not any sort of contract involved in this,” Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in February, speaking about the grant program. “If your project merits awesomeness, then we’ll give the award out. We don’t want to put ourselves in a position of accounting for anybody’s funds. It’s your money at that point and you can do with it what you want. The kind of teams that we’re looking at doing these projects are super motivated to do good work, and so I doubt we’ll see anybody doing anything other than furthering their project goals.”

Epic plans on eventually giving out up to $5 million in grants to game developers.

Winners

404Sight from Retro Yeti Games – $13,000

Developed by a team of University of Utah students, 404Sight is an endless running game that Epic compares to Mirror’s Edge, Robot Unicorn Attack, and Wipeout. On its website, Retro Yeti Games explains that 404Sight is also about Net Neutrality, saying, “Our game is a statement about protecting Net Neutrality and preventing ISPs from slowing and restricting access to the internet.”

ADR1FT from Three One Zero – $15,000

ADR1FT (apart from having a slightly annoying name) is a low gravity survival game where players are put in the role of an amnesiac astronaut adrift in a partially destroyed space station. The game supports virtual reality and tasks players with floating through shredded corridors, scavenging to replenish their quickly depleting oxygen supplies while trying to figure out what happened to them. You can view a trailer with lots of heavy breathing here.

Storm United from PixelBeam – $10,000

MMO shooter Storm United was about a month from releasing last year when Unreal Engine 4 came out, and the team at PixelBeam made the decision to hold off releasing it and instead port the entire game over to the new engine. Storm United will soon be on Steam Greenlight, and Epic says it will feature “deep social interactions.”

Screenshot via Unreal Engine/YouTube