The Innovation Program was announced in December last year, with Improbable stating its interest in what smaller dev teams might accomplish using its world-building technology. This is clear from the first round of selected partners, which were announced at GDC today.

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• Seed by Klang Games - A game of planetary settlement set in a shared, persistent world, created by a team including former employees of CCP Games.
   

• Lazarus by Spilt Milk Studios - a multiplayer, top-down 2D shooter set in a huge galaxy populated by artificially intelligent alien factions locked in a war for territory.
   

• Chronicles of Elyria by Soulbound Studios - an MMORPG built with the Unreal engine, running on SpatialOS and set in a world where characters age, die, and shape their legacy through multiple lifetimes as different characters.
   

• Vanishing Stars: Colony Wars by Ninpo Game Studio - a new type of massively multiplayer real-time strategy game, played across thousands of star systems, each with their own planets to battle on.

All developers selected for the Games Innovation Program, which is run in partnership with Google Cloud services, can use SpatialOS to create and test their games until commercial release at a "significantly reduced, and in many cases completely eliminated" cost. That includes the cloud computing fees that are essential to what SpatialOS is designed to achieve.

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"These are just the first of many innovative game projects we will be supporting through subsidised access to SpatialOS and cloud computing," said CEO Herman Narula. "We win by showing the many possibilities SpatialOS opens up to game developers, so we will be aggressively supporting innovative projects like these."

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Improbable is also using GDC as the platform to showcase integration with the Epic's Unreal Engine. A custom-built demo will be used at the show itself, which Nerula described as an "experimental" step on the way to an alpha-level SDK. "This is a huge step for our platform," he said.