Here what’s going on in our dark dungeons lately.

It’s almost time to show our games to the public, and we started building our wicked marketing machine!
Several hours went into press kits, concept art and designing content for upcoming pages in our website.
The Treilac race received a huge lore update, and we fixed a couple of incosistencies in our game setting.

We also focused our efforts on optimizing Syder performances, and our fierce battle against garbage collection still rages on!
We built a first draft for our achivements and high score wrapper, and we are now merging it into both our games.

Syder Arcade went trough some serious testing and we started drafting our actual game levels.
During this process we built a new camera system and decided to join together our last two levels to create one huge, epic, last battle.
To make up for this, we decided to add a new game mode with at least 4 mini-levels.
This new game mode temporarily called “blitz” and is designed to be super-fast and super-challenging.

More info coming soon!

We finally have a playable Alpha Version!
While Syder is not yet to be released in any form, we already have some important features in our latest build:

- In-depth attribute system, parametric ship navigation, weapons and damage calculation.
- Prototype GUI for community chat, team creation, game lobby and ship setup.
- Prototype GUI for in-game tactical map.
- Prototype targeting system.
- 3 different ships with their basic abilities, several debris.
- Standard chasing AI with basic combat capability.
- Advanced perk sysyem, with several working upgrades.
- Basic mission logic, waypoints, kill counters, random spawn rules for background and in-game entities.
- Basic net-code for 2 players.
- In game metrics to gather useful info.

Right now we are busy polishing and optimizing, and soon we will move to import a good amount of new asses we already created.
Including some huge capitals ships.

We are also ready to officially announce Syder Arcade!

Syder Arcade is a side scroller shooter, a tribute to our arcadey roots!
It started as a joke here at Studio Evil, but everyone loved it, so we decided to make an actual game!
We summoned the mighty Z4g0 to come in our help and sacrificed sacred hours the purest sleep.
The first playable version of Syder Arcade was born, and we showed it for the first time at the Games Week.

The audience loved it, and we decided to double the efforts to provide you the best fake-retro experience we can build! :D

Stay tuned for more info on both our Syder projects. And show your support on indiedb, facebook or twitter!

From last friday until sunday we have been guests at the Indievault booth during the first edition of Games Week in Milan, the biggest consumer fair about videogames we have here in Italy.

It’s been two(+1) days since Games Week ended.
It was a great expereince, but three days of non-stop standing around and talking to people, right after a month of crunch time … Well, it was a bit intense.
We desperatedly needed some rest, so we took a couple of days off. Yesterday I was asleep most of the time :)

Our booth was just outside the super-shiny, mega-loud zone occupied by all the huge mainsteam companies (You know them, Sony, Nintendo , Microsoft, EA, Activision … )

Aside from our projects, wich will require dedicated posts, there were many other Italian indies showcasing their work.

Our friends at Nuoxygen were showing all their migthy impressive porfolio of games, with Monster Trouble, and their brand new titles for iOS: Ikaro Racing HD, Simple Racing and Magic Forumla.

Tiny Colossus literally abducted visitors with UFHO2, their turn based multiplayer puzzle-game.
Players stopped by and did not leave. The game has a lot of potential, and they are about to start a kicksterter campaign, so keep an eye on the project!

Darkwave Games were there with their classic iOS game Master of Alchemy (now coming to PC) and a pretty beefy preview of their upcoming shooter-non shooter Act of Fury (iOS).
The game has that coin-op vibe that we at Studio Evil love so much, I can’t wait to have the full version on my IPad :)

The world famous Santa Ragione were mesmerizing the audience with their impressive Fotonica, and I’m pretty sure Nicolò also fired up Aliante a couple of times (One of the games you can find he IGF Pirate Kart by the way).

Mattia Trasverso, a young indie was there with One and One story, a charming puzzle-platformer that tells the story of a couple in love.
Fun, not-evil fact: In Mattia’s game there are also co-op levels meant to be played by 2 players, a real couple got to try this co-op mode and when they won … they kissed!
How cute is that? I’ll tell you, my eyeballs still hurt, there was so much love in the air I’ve almost lost my evil powers of darkness. Almost.

Just funny Games were showcasing their super-polished puzzle Trigonon (iOS) and the digital version of the board game Kingsburg (iOS).

Bloody Monkey challenged our minds with (This is a) META game. And I finally had a chance to play the game. Absolutely brillant.
Paolo, if you read this, you have to release that game somehow. 20 levels of so much awesome are good enough.

We also had the chance to meet our friends from the italian scene, like Ivan Venuturi, videogame industry pioneer who, wrote a super nice post about Syder on his blog (in italian). Thank you Ivan!

Our buddies from the indievault community were there too, Starting from Vincenzo Lettera, supreme ruler of the Indievault and responsible for this beautiful gathering.
Minibill, who totally won our Syder Arcade Alpha, Morgoth that valilantly started doing PR for us, Goo that won at life scoring a lunch date with one of the Nintendo girls!

An honorable mention MUST go to Federico ‘Midian’ Cardini, after performing his duty as a journalist, literally turned into one of us (helped by one of our awesome red tees) and started showcasing Syder to EVERYONE in sight. That was great! Thank you man, we love you.

And finally we have to thank AESVI, the italian association of videogame publishers for providing indievault (and indirectly to us) the chance to promote our work, for free.

Oh yeah, and we had Syder playable alpha AND an an unannouced Syder spin-off, Syder Arcade. But I’ve already written too much for a single post!

Looks like everyone submitted their game to IGF! Congratulations world of indies!
We did not. After crunching hard to complete an early alpha in time, there was simply too much left to do before we could submit Syder anywhere.
However we extended crunching for another couple of weeks, because we like it, and because we have to show a playable alpha at Gamesweek in Milan!

Let’s see what we actually did since our last update:

- several improvements to our “ubershader”, like better rim lighting and detail maps
- engines effects and manouvering logic
- muzzleflashes, explosion and weapon impacts
- slicing-burning effects for object destruction
- lock-on targeting logic and graphics
- basic shields effect
- markers for off screen targets and mission objectives
- continued working on mission logic and random event generator
- game world background history and characters almost finalized.
- prototypes for custom controlled glow and distortion post effects
- one new Amgarr miniboss with 2 variations, “bull” and “defender”
- new portraits and backgrounds for alien factions

Much work went on polishing features and art, we will move into building an actual level in a couple of days. We are also going to need tons of coffee…