Former Driveclub, Motorstorm devs form Wushu Studios

A new UK developer has opened doors as several former Sony employees have banded together.

Wushu Studios is primarily staffed by various employees at Secret Sorcery, an indie team that formed in the wake of mass layoffs at Evolution Studios, best known for PlayStation racers Driveclub and Motorstorm.

Secret Sorcery was originally set up to work on virtual reality games such as PSVR god sim Tethered. But Wushu founder Alan McDermott - previously game director at Evolution - told Eurogamer the team is moving back to console development, which will be far less "commercially challenging."

"[Tethered] gave us a taste for how bringing AAA values to indie game development could be a double edged sword," McDermott told our sister site.

"You have all this creative freedom to make the game you want to make and the game you think gamers will want to play, but it's so easy to overlook incredibly important aspects like community engagement. Even though we didn't market the game well at all, I'm still enormously proud of the accomplishment."

The team has now expanded to 11 people, including new recruits Alex Figini and Nate Najda. Figini previously worked as a concept artist at BioWare on Mass Effect 3, while Najda is best known as a tipster on the NeoGAF and ResetEra forums.

Wushu Studios' first project will be a new science fiction IP built with Unreal Engine 4. The team is self-funding the game and began work in the first prototype in September 2017, which will be taken to GDC in March to show to potential partners.