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!
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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.

Here we are for another development update on SYDER, our sci-fi themed multiplayer shmup.
This week has been pretty intense both on the coding and creative side, with the “netcode” almost comlete and the basics of the game world properly documented.
Right now we are stress-testing the proto-game under heavy lag to see how it performs.

Also, we plan to have some tecno-organic ships. I’ts almost like having dinosaurs in space shooting laser beams.