has been a long time since we posted something … we were busy patching up our real lives after the Dream Build Play mega-rush … and we were also busy recovering from the “schorching” defeat we managed to achieve.
As you know, we always worked with our friends Xevian and Raven from rawmode to develop our projects … so we decided to merge into a single group, to form something new and more “professional” … this something we called “STUDIO EVIL”.

STUDIO EVIL is mutantpenguis + rawmode; we will continue our projects under this new flag.
So, visit our new comepletely kick-ass website: www.studioevil.com

And what about the mutantpenguins now?
After years of glorious service, first as a small italian game-dev community, and later as the XNA developers you know, we are going to “shut down” this website and focus on our new project only.

This decision was not at all easy and for Duke and me, but I am confindent that parhaps one day, the mutantpenguins will come back, to be what they always meant to be … videogames characters.

Thank you for all your support and interest in all our crazy projects in the past, we hope that you’ll support the band new Studio Evil too!

Check www.dreambuildplay.com for the “best 20″ in the contest.

Too bad we are not in that list …

Ooooh well, next time we will make sure to have a game ready BEFORE any contest starts, so that we can be a little more competitive, and yes, and we will put some blood and boobies in it, obviously according to the contest rules …
Or parhaps we should make another game about Newton’s law … who knows, everyone likes them.

So … congratulations everyone!

( At least Duke owes me a pizza+beer now )

Ok, Ok, we have been quite cryptic about our game, we literally consumed ourselves to meet the DBP contest deadline, so we were “a little tired” … and now that we rested for a while we “noticed” that the info we released about our game were a little … inadeguate.

So, let’s start from the beginning, we even messed up with the game’s title… O_O!

The game is called “The Night of The Puppets: Road to Yggard”.

“Pocus Pocus” was the codename of the project in the early stages of his developing.
Our game tastes like an action-rpg, but it’s more like one of those old-school arcade shoot-em-ups.
You roam across the land infested by evil puppets, and you have to blast them with your spells, activated by “gestures” wich are really similar to fighting game “moves”.
In the final version of the game there should be a considerable part of the gameplay in wich you interact with the scenery to advance in your adventure, but at the moment it’s just in the wishlist.
Here are some of the game’s features:

- first of all, our game is in full 3D, just in case the “temporary” lack of shadows and proper lighting fooled you to think there was something prerendered …
- spline interpolated skeletal animation system
- large-scale levels
- dynamic multi-textured terrain
- animated vegetation, grass, flowers, leaves and stuff …
- dynamic lighting, but this feature is likely not showing it’s real potential at the moment…

We also developed a really powerful level editor, an original storyline, and a small army of characters… too bad not everyone of them ended up in the DBP release

We have even our soundrack, kindly provided by “The Why Not?”

The Development of The Night Of The Puppetts started just three months and a half ago, after we finished with “G” … and is FAR from being OVER.

Ok, just to finish this post, here are some concepts form 2 enemies that we were not able to put into the DBP release of the game, the powerfull “Dark Caster” and the evil “Box”.

As this famous sentence says, the dice has been cast.
We will see if it is a lucky throw, or not.
After three months and a half of hard work, we submitted our entry to the DBP contest. Using all the time we had, until the last second of the “extra time” given by the deadline extension.

Here are some screens from Road to Yggard.

This time, for the joy of you all, we will not be able to release our contest entry… but in a near future we will problably have some more polished stuff about our game to show.

In the meantime if you want to have a look at the other beautiful games that were submitted to the dream build play contest, you can try swampthingtom’s list, or if you like screenshots, Ziggyware.com.

Enjoy!
And may the best game prevail!