Of Pennies and Arcades
This is really awesome. Back at PAX Prime, Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade asked James to write up his proposal story. James did and now it’s on the site! I cannot say enough how amazingly amazing this is.

Pumpkins!
With the bitter cold of fall settling in, the smell of burning pumpkins fill the air and all we can think about is spooky specters and sweet, sweet candy. As you might have guessed, Halloween is a special time of year for Ska Studios as is evident in the kind of games we make. We’d like to celebrate this month’s fall festival with some pumpkin carving patterns!

We’d love to see any fan-made Ska Studios pumpkin designs so please send pictures my way! I will place a few or all of them over at the Art Unicorner. Of course you can always create your own pumpkin designs, you don’t have to use my patterns but if you do want some, download them below and get carving!

Download the ZIP of all the files here!

Included:
The Dishwasher Pumpkin
Yuki Pumpkin
Cat Pumpkin
Crow Pumpkin
Vampire Smile Pumpkin
Z0MB1ES Angry Face Pumpkin
Charlie Murder PunKin
Lester Deth PunKin
Tommy Homicide PunKin
Rexicutioner PunKin
Skelekitten PunKin

These patterns rely on using multiple layers and only the Z0MB1ES pattern cuts all the way through. Here is a video and written directions on how to carve layers.

Monster of the Day
As a personal project, every year since 2008, I’ve made an attempt to create a monster a day during the month of October. I wrote a little blog post about it and have made it up to day 6. I hope to keep it up until the end of the month. Check out where I am storing and will be updating them.

Oh yea and we’re still working on Charlie Murder. More on that next time!

Random Fun

James here!  I got sidetracked by my ubiquitous desire to get good at animating pixel art; I rigged my good old animation editor to let me draw pixel art for each frame.  It’s my first painting program!  It’s super rudimentary right now: there’s only draw and erase (left mouse, right mouse) and no selecting yet!  However, it’s got onion skinning and the same animation/keyframes/frames hierarchy that I’ve been breathing ever since Dishwasher 1. Also, I still have triggers and scripting, so I can map out combos and spawn particles visually.  Here’s the editor:

Right now it stores data in what is probably the most obtuse way ever: a dictionary of <row, rowData>, where rowData is a dictionary of <column, pixelData>.  Each frame is rendered in-editor by iterating through the outer row dictionary, then iterating through each row’s inner column dictionary and drawing each pixel one by one.  Obviously I intend to bake these out into sprite sheets.  Obviously.

The little guy in red is for a game I may or may not ever make called (tentatively) Nails Hero.

Ok fine, here’s a screenie from Charlie Murder

Lester’s in the cemetery, mixing up the medicine!

We’ve been overhauling lots of art and making more game.  This shot is actually from an area that was in the PAX demo, but the new map art really makes it pop.  Depth!

Merch Reminder

On Monday, I made a post about some new shirts in our store! Check them out and buy them! Yayyy buying stuff!

One big difference between the previous shot: it’s 720p, baby!  Survival Crisis Z, by contrast, was good old VGA–640×480, and the previous SCX shot was 800×600 (the XNA default).  Get with the times, James!

Well, long story short, thought gave way to coding, and after a little bit of work, here’s what I came up with:

Brilliant, no?

If you want to play with the old SCZ (warning: won’t work on Vista, won’t work on displays that don’t support 640 x 480, may just not work in general), here’s the zip.

I’m not guaranteeing this game (let’s call it Survival Crisis X for now) will get off the ground, and if it does, everyone will have to wait at least a year for it to see the light of day, but hey, I just love posting screenies!