StudioEvil

Apolgies, and less bullshit on this site

DIT — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:09:24 +0000

One thing you should do when you have a website is READ what you actually wrote, especially if your content is months or years old.

I did, and I should have done it way earlier. Our pages were full of incorrect informations about our projects and team status, and I feel the urge to apologize.

Our website was reporting we were still developing out old projects IMPACT! and Polpette, which sadly is not true.

Since the beginning of this year, we started everyting (well almost everything) from scratch and we are now working on entirely new projects.

You should now find that our website is more in-line with who we are and what we are actually doing.

Codename “Lancelot”

DIT — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 21:42:40 +0000

A lot is happening around Studio Evil lately, good things.
This year will be really important four us, and we feel the “right moment” is approaching really fast.
If we have good timing and some luck we could actually be able to start a great adventure during the next few months.

Pre-production for our new project, codenamed “Lancelot”, is advancing.
It’s still a draft, but as the concept takes shape we become more and more confident about the possible results.

Wish us luck! :D

Just a small project update

DIT — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:02:20 +0000

Hello people!
Our work on the new project is advancing, but still we don’t have anything worth showing.
While I’m writing down our design ideas and the first bits of the game’s story, Duke and Xevian are working on a prototype of our rendering pipeline, that we intend to use both in our game and tools.

Hopefully we’ll have some concept art to show during next week.

XNA hearts WPF at Shibuya

Duke — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:39:03 +0000

Hello coders! This time here at StudioEvil we are working hard to provide first-class solutions for our new game! So let’s start with the level editor (codename: Shibuya)

In this first sprint i’ve worked on the integration between WPF and XNA. You know: there is a problem called airspace when you try to render different DirectX surface one above the other in the same window, and both these guys uses DirectX behind the scenes…

This is obviously ugly, and solution that suffers the airspace problem have a poor integration and support of all the great things that WPF can do for your GUI. To tell the truth, if you document yourself a little bit and you have a couple of hour of good work to spend on this you can achieve something very nice, it’s not so hard! In this post i’m going to provide you some usefull links, if you are trying to achieve the same result, and also i’ll demonstrate where i’m now.

Please keep in mind that is the result of the first sprint only (we are using SCRUM) this is not even a beta, and i’ve a dozen of other ideas to add to this now, but… hey! it already works great!

A couple of nice links for you…

A MUST-READ tutorial on DirectX/WPF integration

Interesting discussion between gentlements on WPF and XNA hacking

And now the trailer of ”Wpf loves Xna” in beautyful technicolor!

How do you start creating a new game?

DIT — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 22:47:47 +0000

For G, it was like an intuition, a flash of images and shifting concepts coming from somewhere in my mind. But G it’s just a little game; intuition and the right amount of luck were enough to build a game experience that somewhat worked.
When we started the development of The Night of the Puppets, we knew we wanted to make a challenging project. But we lacked the experience to build such a larger project and ultimately we failed.
Failure is bad. Failure breaks motivation and the coesion of the team, and without a super-motivated team you can’t build games moonlighting. Also failure spawns fear and a fearful designer spawns crappy, soulless projects.
I’ve come to understand that creativity is somewhat an act of courage, you just have to be brave if you want to create something meaningful.

Now we have this new game concept. And it’s bold and challenging (and it’s still to early to talk about). But is this new game concept actually some good? Being brave does not mean blindly rushing forwards like we did before.
This time we have a plan: 1) Find an awesome idea (We’are almost there). 2) Have a consistent team organization and workflow (we’ve adopted an agile method and it’s working great).
3) Keep our minds healty, feed our intellects and skills with tasty informations and experiences 4) Wirte code / Do art. 5) Dont’ stop. 6) Win.

Gamasutra recently translated in english and interview with Jordan Mechner and Eric Chahi.
If you don’t know those two guys, they designed two of the greatest games of my childhood (and probably two of the greatest games ever), Prince of Persia and Another World.
There is a part of this interview that really helped me change the my perspective. Asked about where they take their inspiration for games, Jordan Mechner says:

“[...] A game should be about something, not just about other games“.

So, how do you start creating a new game? I’m really no great designer but … Find an expereince, find something you want to communicate. Dont’ start looking at other games, look elsewhere, be brave, and DO that game.

We love you all!

DIT — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:39:29 +0000

I can’t belive you are still following us!
I mean … This is amazing considering thie huge amount of nothing and bullshit we released during the last two years!

We’ve finally re-united the team and we are back to work.
Can’t really say anithing more than that, there are already too many useless posts on this website.

While you wait for us to post something tasty, we have a couple of friends up to make awesome games … check out UFHO2 and Zombiedog!

SBRILLO! … And other news …

DIT — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 19:01:51 +0000

We’ve been silent for months again.
But this time we are back with something serious to show.

The first thing is a video preview of Sbrillo™, the tool Xevian has been developing during these months!
In this video we introduce you to one of the software’s features, the shader editor!

We will soon release a beta version.

The second thing is why we haven’t advanced with our games lately… most of the team was hired for other projects and our time for moonlighting was gone.
However, one of these projects is a browser game, that now is entring beta:

Enua Online

At the moment Enua in only in Italian, you will have to wait some months before we are ready with an international version.

Directly from Duke’s toolbox!

Duke — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 21:50:13 +0000

Hello, the bad guys of StudioEvil have another present for all the coders out there. A brand new matrix visualizer for your debugger! Check it out at its download page!

Skulls are cool (and evil)

DIT — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 16:04:45 +0000

Yeah, I know, I’m the best with titles.
I’ts quite hard to find someting interesting to write on the website at this moment, we are regrouping after the not-so-awesome 2008. To to do that, we are salvaging every good bit of code we produced since our beginning, this means a lot of work for the coders and very little to show. However it will be just a temporary situation, considering thet we are bringing back to life the amazing animation engine we built for The Night of The Puppets AND a brand new Shaders and particle editor :).
I’m not going to tell you that hopefully we will start working on a new game after these tecnical operations are done … halfway trough February.

In the meanwhile our graphics department (me) is studying Zbrush. Next time we will have tons of normal maps :D

G v1.0.0.4

DIT — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 21:28:17 +0000

I know, we are not really good at updating the website … however, here we are with at least a new version of G, again. If you still enjoy our little game you can now run it with the latest XNA 3 runtime. This time the installer is definitely smaller and should work properly, auto downloading the required stuff (.NET 3.5 and XNA 3).

There is not much to say about what we’ve been doing during these months … let’s just say thing got a little busy for everyone during 2008.

But even during our months of “radio silence”, you guys kept supporting us with comments and emails! We really appreciate that, and wanted to say a big “Tank you!” to everyone.

Alexander Grafenstein (www.cellardoorgames.de) told us he used our texture pack to write his great tutorial for the Ziggyware Fall 2008 XNA Article Contest.
We receive a lot of questions about the puppeteer editor video we posted on YouTube, so if you are interested in world building & terrain generation you should really check it out.

Have an happy Christmas!