Walking Dead, Mark of the Ninja vets form Campo Santo, working on new game

A group of industry veterans whose work includes The Walking Dead and Mark of the Ninja co-founded a new development studio, according to a post on the new studio's official blog.

Campo Santo's staff includes former Telltale creative director and designer Jake Rodkin, designer and writer Sean Vanaman, as well as Mark of the Ninja lead designer Nels Anderson and artist Olly Moss, who's worked with Lucasfilm, Studio Ghibli and others.

Campo Santo's first game is "being both backed by and made in collaboration with the stupendous, stupidly-successful Mac utility software-cum-design studio slash app/t-shirt/engineering company Panic Inc. from Portland, Oregon," Vanaman wrote.

Panic's software includes the web editor Coda, the FTP client Transmit. Panic also has the distinction of registering the world's first emoji domain.

"So why are we doing this?" Vanaman wrote. "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. As we talk to our friends and industry colleagues about "doing something indie" with us, there's a shared pragmatism informed by years in the industry that melds with the lingering youthful enthusiasm that got us into games to begin with. 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.'