The first dungeon-based game to realistically depict underground life, Dungeon Hero promises all the danger, intrigue and daily routine of an actual subterranean community. Combining HD graphics with incredibly detailed environments completely immerses players in their newfound surroundings, complete with goblin cheese merchants, jailed troll miners and helpful imps just looking for peace.

Dungeon Hero provides players with a fresh take on the classic dungeon based game. The in-game world is a totally functional, living, breathing community in every way. Eat, sleep, chat, socialize, trade and travel as you would in any civilized place – after all dungeon creatures are people too! Fierce adrenaline pumping close quarters combat against a multitude of enemies drives the player deep into their heroic role. The battle system is intense with savage encounters that will leave enemies wondering where they went wrong. Dark times call for one to stand against many, will you be the one strong enough to become the Hero of the Dungeon?

Morpheme is robust middleware designed to give developers and animators unprecedented creative control over the look of their final in-game animation by allowing them to author and preview blends, blend trees and transition graphs in real time.

“In Dungeon Hero we’re creating an environment that needs to feel real and alive to the player,” said Simon Bradbury, Designer at Firefly Studios. “The game features a lot of fearsome monsters, and we wanted to ensure that their movements are natural. morpheme gives us that amazing degree of animation control, enabling us to produce very realistic-looking behavior.”

“Dungeon Hero is poised to be one of the biggest action RPG hits of 2009,” said Andy Payne, NaturalMotion’s VP of Sales, Europe. “Demonstrating their usual commitment to excellence, Firefly is creating a dark, gritty and realistic experience and we’re thrilled that they’ve chosen morpheme to create their in-game animations.”

Morpheme:runtime is a run-time engine optimized for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, and ships with full source code. morpheme:connect is a powerful 3D authoring application that allows animators to graphically author blend trees and transition logic (based on Hierarchical Finite State Machines), modify and edit parameters through sliders and view the results in realtime. morpheme is designed as a flexible and open system and does not require the licensing of any other product. Unlike euphoria, morpheme is not based on Dynamic Motion Synthesis. Instead, morpheme complements euphoria’s advanced real-time behaviors.

Dungeon Hero is slated for a Spring 2009 release on a PC and Xbox 360.