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Development Diary #3

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 Welcome to Octobers Dev Diary Development Update Welcome to this month’s development update from PixelPunk Studios. September brought a flurry of activity across design, systems, and playtesting for Raveren, and the team has made steady, visible progress toward a tighter, more balanced alpha experience. Progress and highlights • HUD and UX: We implemented a full in‑game HUD, including a working minimap, clearer player status indicators, and contextual prompts. The HUD now cleanly communicates player position, nearby objectives, and active status effects, which has already improved playtesters’ situational awareness. • Health system overhaul: Based on player feedback, we rebuilt the health system from the ground up. The previous design felt unforgiving: player deaths occurred too quickly and recovery options were limited. The new system smooths damage pacing, increases readability of incoming damage, and introduces more consistent healing opportunities to keep gameplay engaging...
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Development Diary #2

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Another Month, Another Update We're continuing to make great strides with Raveren , and development remains in full swing. Over the past few weeks, we've upgraded our engine from Unreal Engine 5.5 to 5.6—a move that has delivered several highly anticipated performance enhancements across the board. In addition to the engine upgrade, we've integrated both AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) 3.1 and NVIDIA's DLSS into the game. While these upscaling technologies offer impressive results, we’re committed to going beyond them. Unlike many modern studios that rely heavily on upscalers for performance gains, our team is focused on deep, native optimization to ensure the best possible experience for players. To that end, we're leveraging Unreal Engine’s Nanite Virtualized Geometry to streamline rendering and improve overall efficiency. It's just one of the many tools we're using to push Raveren to its full potential. The steam storepage is now also live! s...
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Dev Diary 1: Environments of Eltheria

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What a week it’s been here at PixelPunk! We’ve officially migrated the entire Raveren project to Unreal Engine 5, unlocking a new level of visual fidelity, performance, and creative freedom. But that’s just the beginning. 🎮 Combat & AI Overhaul We’ve rebuilt our entire combat and AI systems from the ground up. Expect smarter enemies, tighter mechanics, and more dynamic encounters. The goal? To make every battle feel responsive, challenging, and deeply immersive. 🧭 Menu Redesign Our UI/UX team has reimagined the game’s menus to better reflect Raveren’s atmospheric tone. The new design is sleek, intuitive, and built for immersion—whether you’re navigating inventory, adjusting settings, or diving into lore. 🌍 Worldbuilding in Motion Meanwhile, our environments team has been hard at work shaping the many landscapes you’ll traverse. From eerie forests bathed in moonlight to crumbling ruins echoing with forgotten lore, every location is crafted to pull you deeper into the world. This ...
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Announcing Raveren: The Legend of Eltheria

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We here at Master Chief Studios are pleased to annouce Raveren: The Legend Of Eltheria! It will be launching on Steam late next year, we do have a provisional date in mind, however we are not ready to commit to a single launch date yet! The team has been hard at work creating entire new worlds not seen the previous iterations of the game, creating whole new terrain systems and TOD systems. The materials and textures has also undergone a massive reworking to improve the quality. We have also upgraded from UE4.26 to UE4.27 and we are also working on a UE5 version of the game in parrell. Unlike before the game will be fully compatable with linux systems including Steam OS for the Steam Deck. We have attached a video from one of the recent builds of the game for you to take a look at. Raveren takes place in the lands of Eltheria, where you must discover all the secrets, battle mythical creatures across various different biomes of Eltheria.
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Castle Wars Dev Diary #2

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 Today we are happy to share with you some insight into the development of Castle Wars and where we are up to with progress on the game. So without further ado lets begin. Over the last few months, we have been super busy and hard at work, working on the gameplay mechanics, AI, Story for the Campaign and the maps, as it currently stands there is 3 maps developed for the game, with 2 of them being completed and the other map is close to completion.  The base game mechanics have now been implemented fully into the game, along with the character animations and sounds, the sounds are still pretty much placeholder at this stage. Animations Demo Below is a video taken directly from one of our team, who is working on the animations. Gameplay Demo We have prepared a short gameplay demo, showcasing everything we have spoken about on this blog Unreal Engine 5 As some of you may be aware, Unreal Engine 5 has been officially released. Castle wars won't ship on Unreal Engine 5, however we ...
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Castle Wars Enviroments (Dev Diary #1)

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 Hello Everyone, and welcome to this blog post, we are sorry for the lack of updates over the last few months, We have been incredibly busy working on 3rd party projects which have taken up the majority of our time. We have unfortunately with a heavy heart have to announce that we have cancelled all further development on Pub Simulator, and have handed the licenses for that title back over to Yellow Noodle Games. However, we are hard at work on developing Castle Wars, which will be our first title, whilst we cannot give a release date yet, we aim to show you some of the levels and gameplay over the coming weeks, below are some screenshots of the 1st 2 levels that we have been building, Please bear in mind these levels are not final, and are in various stages of development.
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Changing Times

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  Hello Everybody, you may have noticed a few changes have happened, We are no longer called Yellow Noodle Games, We have changed our name to Old Pack Horse Studios, the reason behind this was that we sold Yellow Noodle Games to a partner we was working with on a few titles. I would like to reassure you all that we are still commited to working on the same games we was working on under Yellow Noodle, Pub Simulator and Castle Raiders are completely unaffected by this name change. We wish the new owners of Yellow Noodle Games all the best in the future and we look forward to working closely with them in the future.
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