Crystal Dynamics and Visceral veterans form Space Dust Studios

Veteran designers of Crystal Dynamics, Criterion, Atari and EA Visceral Melbourne have joined forces to form a new AAA indie game developer, Space Dust Studios.

The new studio, located in Melbourne, Australia, is currently working on its first title. Space Dust made its official reveal on its teaser website, which states the team of former mainstream game designers are "going indie" and "making the games we've always wanted to make."

According to the Australian and New Zealand games developers website Tsumea, one of the senior developers on the team, Nathan Thomas, previously provided feedback on the proposed draft guidelines for the Australian Interactive Games Fund, which pushed for pre-production funding. His statement offers some insight into the new studio:

"In our particular case, our core team consists of 5 senior developers, with collectively over 50 years of AAA local and international development experience (including programming on the recently released Dead Space 3). Our medium scale PC project has a planned 18 month development cycle, and will require significant local staffing resources during production. We also have interest from talented senior developers who are eager to return to Melbourne and join our project.

"We would benefit immensely from a pre-production ‘seed' investment to produce the materials needed to attract the production investment required to complete the project. Our overall production budget will exceed AUD 1 million (inclusive of a professional marketing plan budget)."