Mark of the Ninja and The Walking Dead leads form new studio Campo Santo

What do you get when you mix the Mark of the Ninja lead designer with a couple of The Walking Dead scribes, a former Studio Ghibli artists, and a "stupidly-successful" software company from Portland? A new promising indie developer by the name of Campo Santo, that's what.

It's got an impressive pedigree, that's for sure. The studio's full credits include: former Telltale creative director and designer Jake Rodkin; another ex-Telltale designer and writer, Sean Vanaman; Mark of the Ninja's head honcho Nels Anderson; and artist Olly Moss, whose credits include work at Studio Ghibli, Lucasfilm, Sony and Mondo. The four-person team will be collaborating with Panic Inc, who made the Mac OSX web editor Coda.

Panic will be funding the fledgling company's first expedition, so Kickstarter haters can rest easy on this one. According to Panic's Cabel Maxfield Sasser, the software company is mostly just investing on the team's first mystery project, but the two entities will work together more in the future. "We're primarily Uncle Moneybags, but I'm confident we'll do a lot of cool stuff together," Sasser tweeted.

"It's an unlikely partnership that means we get to conceive of, make, and distribute a video game the way we want to and the way we know how, with no per-prescribed set of rules or formula for how it's done," Vanaman wrote on the studio's blog.

We don't know much about Campo Santo's debut project at the time other than it's going to be on PC, Mac and Linux. But given the team's background, it definitely sounds like one to keep an eye on.