Slant Six details Strata Scavenger, hints at new project for "major publisher"
Operation Raccoon City studio juggling multiple new titles.
Strata Scavenger, the new IP from Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City developer Slant Six teased earlier this week, is a post-apocalyptic flight sim for PC, PlayStation Network and XBLA, with a focus on gathering and trading resources, the studio has revealed.
Senior producer Mike Kerr told Eurogamer that it's partly inspired by Flash game Motherload.
"You're running out into the world with limited fuel for your craft, hunting and exploring what is quite a massive post-apocalyptic cityscape," he explained.
"You're looking for resources, bringing them back to your base, combining them to make better trade items and then working your way through a system of merchants to trade with. That's the baseline concept."
Bankrolled in part by the Canadian Media Fund, it's the studio's first original IP, following work on the SOCOM series for Sony and Resident Evil for Capcom.
"It's a new IP for us, internally generated," said Kerr.
"We kind of wanted to look around for the company and diversify a little bit. We love working with major publishers and doing other people's IP - it's something we've done since the beginning of the company - but we also felt like branching out a little bit and doing something on our own."
Kerr expects it to be ready for launch in early 2013.
He also hinted at a few other projects the Vancouver-based outfit is currently juggling.
"One thing that's ongoing right now with a major publisher is kind of an interesting experimental project which is very tech-heavy for us, which is great. But I'm not really able to talk about that," he said.
"And we're internally doing a bunch of different stuff that is kind of along the lines of us diversifying. And then we're constantly on the look out and in various stages of talks with other publishers about doing other IPs. There's a lot of stuff going on for us right now."
Slant Six's action-orientated take on Capcom's zombie franchise launched this week to a rather lukewarm response. See Eurogamer's Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City review for details.