It’s been more than a month since our last post, so even if it’s not friday, it’s time for a dev-update!

During these last weeks we have been busy building the basic blocks of our gameplay. We started polishing and generally improving our first draft of “attribute” system.
Now almost every aspect of the game is defined by a numeric value or “attribute” that influences an object behaves in-game.

Having attributes in place, and after several design iterations, we finally implemented our perk system. Perks are all-purpose attributes modifiers that will be the basics of almost every game machanic in Syder.
We will use perks to define powerups and talent-like upgrades, but also to model the bahavoir of different weapons, temporary buffs and debuffs and other gameplay elements, like areas where we want to apply special rules.

For instance, let’s say you want to use a nebula to hide from other players, it’s a classic sci-fi manouver that every starfighter wants to do.
When you step inside the nebula you get a temporary “hidden inside the nebula” perk that dramatically reduces your starship visibility, making you extremely hard to spot by enemy sensors.
A perk can modify several attributes at once, and to balance things out “hinnen inside a nebula” could also reduce your sensor range to almost zero.

This perk system gives us a nice, granular way to create new, interesting game mechanics and to manage the existing ones.
Our goal was to implement a simple but consistent set of basic rules that enables us to keep the scripted content at minimum.
These basics should leave as much “creative freedom” to the player as possible, and hopefully this will bring up some nice emergent gameplay.

Refactoring our attribute system gave us the chance to improve a couple of things we had already prototyped, like movement and basic weapons.

We changed the movement mechanics in a way that’s less physically accurate but definitely more fun to play, and also added dashing (as in “to dash”).
The basic idea behind the unrealisic concept of dashing with a starship is to increase player mobility, providing more advanced fighting tricks.
Of course dashing comes at the price of energy (the “mana bar” of our starships) so you cannot dash all the time.

During week ends I took a rest form 3d modeling, and worked to get a better grasp on Syder game world and storyline.
Things are starting to shape up nicely as my writings actually begin to make sense.
I’m working on the Amgarr race now, these ugly sentient starships-dudes will play a major role in Syder and also will be one of the main “dangers” our heroes will have to face.
Here, have a slice of their capital ships :D

This last month has been intense also from a more tecnical standpoint.
Having to randomly position our game content in our large space environments proved to be quite callenging. Powerful “unity magic” together with some forum kung-fu and RTFM were required in order to build a space scenery thet was both visually interesting AND performing at a decent frame rate.

Speaking of magic; We’ve been experimenting with some retro post effects for a little Syder-related secondary project we will be announcing soon.

We also implemented a tactical map interface to help your travels in space and shops where you can buy upgrades and change your selected starship.
We’ll explain more about these game features as soon as we have them polished a little bit.

Stay tuned! And show your support on indiedb, facebook or twitter!

We started this week with a barebone multiplayer build of SYDER.
Having chat and basic team management in place, we were really happy to actually start building some gameplay!

We discussed our basic combat rules and went on to define our tactical map function in greater detail.
As I write this post to you, we have the basic movement and damage calculations working in-game and a first draft of enemy AI.

From a more artistic standpoint, this week we re-did all the texture work on the starships for the 2 main human factions.
We had some inconsistecies on the color palettes that had to be fixed.
After that we moved to design some capital ships.

That’s all for this week!
Don’t forget to support us on indiedb, facebook or twitter!

Hello folks!

First of all, the Who’s'Who.
Here Axon talking, formerly the CEO of Studio Evil, and a passionate game developer.

Tomorrow is exactly 2 months since Studio Evil started it’s journey, and it’s time to have a look at what we’ve done.

To be honest, our fist official activity was in may, with a trip to Sweden, to attend to the Nordic Game Conference 2011 in Malmo. We have alot to learn, and we wanted to learn from the masters.
Nordic game-dev and indie scenes are incredible! We’ve been in a professional, creative and collaborative environment; we had the chance to meet and listen to great people that reinforced our vision, and poisitvely influenced the way we want to make games.

But let’s talk about us.
Studio Evil officially started as a company the 6th of June 2011. First week was gone setting up the office and our work environment, discussing our first game concept and… partying!
We decided to finally bring to life a previous game concept, born when Studio Evil was a garage indie group.
Syder is a multiplayer, co-op game inpired by old-school sci-fi shooters, and it’s also a completley new game.
We like to say that Syder is “a game about blowing up stuff in space, with freinds“.

Two months have passed by, and we have done a lot of backgroud work. We are in this strange time when you have to assemble all the pieces and you fear that they will not stick together.

Development terror aside, this is what we have done:
- A decent amount of concept art, a nice game design concept with still some gray areas
- A working network framework, even if we have still some concerns about prediction and interpolation
- A complete new GUI for Unity3D (the Engine we choose) with some nice pixel-perfect 2D/3D widgets
- A networked stand-alone prototype where you can move around and shoot huge amounts of bullets
- A GameState manager, wich hopefully will help us to stick all together
- 3D assets including: Mule, Wasp, Dart, drones, space debris, missiles and a couple of hand painted space backgrounds.

We are now heading to an early alpha release, more like a tech demo.
Feel free to drop us an email if you want to help us with testing (when we are ready)!

Hasta la vista!

As brief note: When someone ask you to build a multiplayer action-space-shooter with dozen of missiles… Kill him before it’s too late.

This week was about getting all the small pieces we built to work together.
We struggled with some annoying Unity bugs and some more with network prediction and interpolation.

After re-designing the “perks and powerup” system for the third time, we found a nice solution that’s and almost grind-free and has a slight boardgame flavour in it.

We also built some basic skyboxes and nebulas, and it was a nice little challenge to get them look right.
I ended up drawing them by hand. They smell like my grandma’s cookies now, almost.