Editoriffic!

I’ve been working on creating an editor for my free time project, Survival Crisis X, that you use just with an Xbox360 controller, and so far the results are [hate to use this word] pleasing. Here’s a nice shot:

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!

15 Comments May 8, 2008

Isometric Test!

Here’s an image from some isometric tech I’ve been working on. I’ve been having a lot of fun with the XNA SpriteBatch, which is a basic object in the XNA framework that can be used for all things 2D. I’ve been abusing the heck out of alpha transparency–a computationally expensive thing in the DX7 days, but a relatively cheap tool now–for smooth transition zombification.

This does remind me–I need to add shadows under characters.

4 Comments May 6, 2008

Just an Experiment…

I get a lot of requests to add multiplayer to SCZ.  While I’m not going to get to work on the code base of that old thing, I was giving some thought to creating an XNA/XBLA version with couch and live co-op and team games, based on smaller scenarios.

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!

8 Comments March 31, 2008

Old School Dishwasher

I had talked about previous iterations of The Dishwasher in my bit-tech.net guest column, and had some requests (ok, one request) for screens of the 3D side scroller iteration.  So, without further ado, behold!

Update: Looks like I’ve let totallyscrewed.net, the domain these were hosted on, slip.  If I can find these pics cached locally anywhere, I’ll put them back up at skasoftware.com or something.

4 Comments December 10, 2007

Guest column is up!

I wrote a guest column for bit-tech.net; check it out.  It’s all about the whole Dream Build Play episode of last summer, and is a great read for James Silva stalkers enthusiasts.

1 Comment December 7, 2007

Dishwashirts Delayed…

Unfortunately, the first run of Dishwashirts hit some snags–I had been trying to work with an online T-shirt screen printing company for awhile and eventually got frustrated, gave up, and asked for cancellation and a refund.

I feel like I had become some sort of uber-nitpicky awful customer, but they had a pretty good-sized laundry list of screwups.  Among them were:

• Spelling vectorize “victories”
• Scaling down a very high res bitmap (~ 4000 x 3000) to about 400×300 and sticking the pixelated mess in the art proof
• Ignoring/overlooking roughly 5 of my requests to move the front logo from the right chest to the left chest
• Sending me proofs days after I had sent them nice vector graphics that still had the nasty pixelated art

Granted, I kept looking at the picture and realizing it needed tweaking, then resending them new art, then getting frustrated; I feel like if I had exactly the right format files looking the way I wanted them to in the first place, I would have Dishwashirts by now.  But honestly–with a track record like theirs, I’m just not comfortable with ordering $500 worth of shirts from this company.  Maybe they’re really good at printing shirts and really awful at printing proofs and following directions (prior to the final printing of course), but I just didn’t feel like risking it.

To make matters worse, when I asked to cancel the order they told me the errors and miscommunication issues were my fault.  They was partially my fault because I kept trying to change things, but blaming the customer is completely unprofessional, and yet another black mark on this print shop’s record.

On the plus side, I got more time to clean up the back image!  The posture just was not settling right with the part of my brain that determines whether postures look right, so I moved some body parts around and am now more satisfied still!  So thank you, T-Shirt company, for saving my design.
Behold the new back design!

Behold the new mockup as well!

So, if you know of any shirt printing companies, please recommend them.  I’m a little fragile from the last ordeal.

3 Comments September 21, 2007