Long time PlayStation developer Idol Games has rebranded and will be known beginning today as Deck Nine Games. The announcement was issued today, along with a reveal that the studio has already partnered with a major AAA publisher.

The rebrand comes as a result of the studio's shift to story driven narrative games after developing a proprietary new toolset called StoryForge. Deck Nine Vice President Jeff Litchford commented on the change and said:

“With the creation of our new, proprietary toolset StoryForge and the shift in studio focus, we are removing the shackles from our creative team and bringing together our two passions; meaningful storytelling and rich gameplay. We’ve invested heavily in our staff of incredibly talented developers and in creating some truly remarkable tools. Our game will be announced at E3 this year where you’ll be able to see our efforts for yourself.”

It appears that StoryForge will function as an engine similar to the one used by Telltale games, but no other information was provided on its functionality. CTO Mark Lyons also commented by saying:

“We built StoryForge to give our writers, directors and cinematic artists and give them the tools they need to make deep, interactive, great looking games. We can’t wait to show what we have created with it.”

Scripts are difficult to write as it is before the branching dialogue options come into play. This new StoryForge technology will allow Deck Nine to integrate motion capture, narrative choices, music and more all in a much easier format. The development team consists of motion capture professionals and cinematic artists, all of which will be working in house.

An in-house motion capture facility cuts down on development time, and allows the team an easier transition for programming. Once complete, all of their work is integrated into their StoryTeller program, which is set up similar to a branching family tree. This allows for a simple plug and play of features such as dialogue, music, cinematic, etc and greatly cuts down on the time needed to integrate them into the game.

Their new game being published by a major AAA partner is the only detail we have so far, and we don't know which platforms it will appear on. The game will be shown at E3 as the studio notes, so we're only two weeks away from seeing what Deck Nine has been working on.