MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
The lead designer of Mark of the Ninja has teamed up with two former Walking Dead developers and a graphic designer to form a new studio, Campo Santo.
The San-Francsico indie consists of Jake Rodkin, Sean Vanaman, Nels Anderson, and Olly Moss, with the latter two working remotely from Vancouver and the UK respectively.
The four has experience with such titles as Sam & Max and Monkey Island, and has already attracted a partnership with Mac utility software company Panic Inc.
“Deciding to found and then actually CREATE a video game studio has felt like a mix of buying a winning lottery ticket and taking a brash detour that results in a near miss with a pedestrian,” opens the studio’s inaugural blog entry.
“Impulse followed by action followed by sitting in your car hyperventilating. The outcome is thrilling at best and disastrous at worst.”
The four are working on an unnamed project, and said only that they’re bringing their first game to Windows, Mac, and Linux.
For all the optimism shown by going independent, the blog explains there really aren’t many end games in the industry that appeal to creatives.
“So why are we doing this? To be honest, it’s because we think we’ve found the right group of people to make the first reason not just worth enduring but actually thrilling,”the blog post explained.
“Some of us want to tell stories, some of us want to build systems, and some of us want to create beautiful looking worlds, but we all want to make something. The stultifying difficulty of making a good game is instantly tempered and then squashed.”
