Conventions and Stuff
As I mentioned before the break, Ska Studios will be exhibiting at PAX East! This time we aren’t entirely alone, as we’re grouping up with other indie developers to form a Mega Indie Booth! More details to be revealed in the coming months.

James and I will also be making our way to San Francisco for a visit to GDC. This time, James has a panel all to himself titled DIY XBLA FTW: The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile Postmortem. If you’re lucky enough to be a GDC attendant, you’ll definitely want to make your way to this presentation.

Link Roundup
It’s also been a while since we linked to others talking about us on the internet so it’s time I had a mini link roundup.

• Sunday Sidebar: Meet Ska Studios – A dialog style interview with us!
• James Silva will destroy anyone who gets in his way – A discussion more oriented around the aesthetics of violence rather than the usual “will it destroy our children’s minds” angle.
• Last PAX Prime, James and I were asked to contribute to a sketch book. But not just any sketch book: a sketch book for charity! We said “sure!” and here was the result. We’re under “Indie Bundle 2″. Although only James was credited (AHEM), I contributed the top sketches while James drew the “Funleashed” doodle. Heck, even my name is signed on there. Grumble, rant, grumble. It is for charity so I suppose I can forgive.
• Review: Z0MB1ES (on teh ph0ne) – Yay, Z0MB1ES!
• Top 5 Xbox Live Arcade Games You Didn’t Play in 2011 – If you didn’t play Vampire Smile, you certainly should now!
• And for a little self indulgence, I’m linking to thisTop 10 Geeky Marriage Proposals . Somehow James and I only made number 9. OK, those other ones are pretty cool but James MADE his proposal! Grumble, rant, grumble. Making it yourself is always number one awesome in my book but I guess that’s why I’m marrying James and not those other 9 dudes. He’ll always be number one to me. < /sappy >
• To finish off this not-so-mini-anymore list: If you are of the proper age and have enjoyed playing, and more often dying, in Z0MB1ES, you may enjoy this drinking game.

Fandom
In addition to the Art Unicorner and our Facebook Fan Art Album, I also have a little Ska Studios Deviantart Group put together. Feel free to join, submit pictures and start a dialog with fellow fans.

A Different Kind of Game Proposal

“Ska Studios Proposal” by Clingermangw
1UP’s “PAX 2011: A Charlie Murder Proposal” video
Postcard from PAX: The Most Touching PAX Moment Ever
IGN Facebook Album
A Gear Fish post
An in-game proposal

Much to the pleasure of those irritated by the other day’s twitter spam about wedding dresses, I won’t bore you with planning details but if something especially awesome and game or zombie related pops up, I’ll be sure to post about it. If you happened to capture video or photography please send it my way to michelle (at) ska-studios (dotcom)!

Mini Link Roundup
I’ll be posting a bigger roundup when more articles come in but for now check out these nifty links:

Giant Bomb Quick Look!
WonderHowTo Article

Even though I have been sick out of my mind this week, as they say, the show must go on. With blurry eyes and a runny nose I’ve been painstakingly packing everything, setting up interview schedules and making sure everything is in its proper place before we jump on a long plane flight to Seattle. It’s way more stuff than I ever thought it was but it will totally be worth it. Major kudos to Dustin who was previously in charge of organizing Ska Studios’ trips to PAX. He’s probably sick to death of my daily pings over IM bombarding him with pestering questions of “how do I do this?” and “how does that work?” He has been a very good, and helpful, sport.

Speaking of pestering, If you haven’t RSVPed to our Facebook event page yet, you totally should go do that now. There’s not any real huge benefit to doing so other than saying “hi” to everyone else attending Ska Studios booth at PAX but we would very much appreciate it!

Timeline
Have you ever wanted to see all the games Ska Studios has made in timeline format? I did and that’s why I made this visual. This timeline doesn’t include all the games James made for Windows (rumor has it he’s trying to downplay his years or reliance on Visual Basic 6) but it does show a nice progression of all things XNA.

A Sad Love Song
If you were looking for the two songs from The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, “Yuki’s Death” and “Come Back to Me”, we’ve had to pull them until further notice from our Bandcamp site. While I, Michelle, would love to get into why, it’s a long story more worthy of being told over a beer than a public blog post. Anyway, serious giant apologies to everyone. All our other awesome songs are still up so go ahead and enjoy them at whatever price, including free! I need one or seven beers now.

PAX PAX PAX PAX
All of our PAX merch and promo item ordering is complete! There’s still a lot left to do (including PAX itself) before we can breathe again and focus just on game making but at least the merch part is checked off and we will have plenty of awesome things to hand out. Four different kinds of things, one of them with variations, in fact. How many booths hand out that many awesome things? That just means we are four to eight times as awesome as everyone else, right? I also made a Facebook Event page just for the occasion.

Yet Another Merchy Reminder
It occurred to me, perhaps a little late, that our new shirts didn’t have descriptions. Well they do now! So, if a witty word or two prevented you from buying a shirt before, now is your chance. We’ll also have shirts for sale at PAX so feel free to stop by, say “hi” and pick up one or fifty.

A Harridan’s Guide
As I mentioned before, a group of awesome ladies and I will be on a panel at PAX called “A Harridan’s Guide to the Game Industry”. It’ll be Friday, August 26th at 12pm! If there is a question burning in your mind you want answered on the panel, please shoot me a tweet @shelldragon or an email to michelle (at) ska-studios.com.

A Little Here, A Little There
There’s not a ton new to report this week.  The big development push is for a PAX Prime Playable Prototype (well, technically a demo, but, you know, alliteration!) and the big non-development push is everything else related to PAX Prime: T-shirts, stickers, banners, landmines, kiosk rentals, etc.  It’s going to be rad to get the latest incarnation of Charlie Murder back onto the floor after a year and a half of hiatus/incubation.

Rogue Music Chaos!
When we first made our music available on Bandcamp, I did a bit of a search to see where else our music might be hanging out and leaving friendly reminders that we now directly provide downloads of all our music. Of course, we don’t really mind that it’s other places around internet (“the more exposure, the better” state of mind) but we’ll remind you anyway that getting it from the source is way awesomer.  You can tip us that way too!  It was really all about the tips the whole time.

Link: Fixed!
James again.  I fixed the link for SCZ!  Evidently I let the www.skasoftware.com domain lapse, which is okay, but the less okay part was that the whole Internet’s main conduit to download SCZ was borked.  It’s borked no more; rejoice!