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…

Syder development continues. Hard.

During these last 2 weeks we implemented many gameplay features, weapons, special abilities, AIs and started balancing the basics of combat. We also finished building a new space partitioning system that will allow us to create and manage some really huge areas in game.
We are now merging all these parts together and we hope to be able to create a complete playable mission in the next couple of weeks.

Also, we are now working with Mauro Fanelli to create our character portraits.
Using Mauro’s stunning artwork we’re experimenting with simple 3D cut-out animations to improve the results even further.

And that’s all for this update. Stay tuned!
We are almost there … I mean … almost ready to show you the game actually running … 0_0!

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!

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.