It looks as if John Smedley’s new game is about to begin hiring in earnest. “We are going to be looking for an experienced Level Designer for my project here at @AMZNGameStudios San Diego soon,” Bill Trost tweeted yesterday.
Trost, a veteran of major MMOs from both SOE and Trion, has been attached to Smed’s new project for almost a year. You’ll recall that following Smed’s 2015 departure from SOE, a company he’d led for almost two decades, he put together a studio called Pixelmage Games, which began work on the ultimately stalled and refunded retro-sandbox Hero’s Song (we’ve discussed why and how that game failed at length right here).
Almost immediately after the collapse of Pixelmage, Amazon announced it had picked up Smed to run an “ambitious new project that taps into the power of the AWS Cloud and Twitch to connect players around the globe in a thrilling new game world.” We quickly realized Smed had just ported most of the Pixelmage team straight over to Amazon for the new game.
So what is it? That part we still don’t know. Job listings have described a “cutting edge action multiplayer game” with a “real time terrain deformation system based on physics simulation,” and Smed has polled his Twitter audience for opinions on shooter gunplay.
We are going to be looking for an experienced Level Designer for my project here at @AMZNGameStudios San Diego soon…
— Bill Trost (@billtrost) January 8, 2018
