Schenectady, NY – May 5, 2010 – Ska Studios cleared up some confusion surrounding the release of their arcade title Charlie Murder by officially announcing that the game is being developed with the band’s input and will be released by Microsoft exclusively on Xbox LIVE Arcade sometime in 2012, along with the purported end of the world.

After initially being announced as an Xbox LIVE Indie Games title, developer Ska Studios decided that the Charlie Murder story was worthy of a bigger stage. After intense negotiations with the band and some bribery, Ska Studios was able to convince the Charlie Murder crew to sell out yet again, and commit to bringing their band’s punk rock story to Xbox LIVE Arcade. As part of the agreement terms, the entire band will complete a one year counseling program at Happy Times Recovery Center in Atlantic City, NJ. Their treatment will focus on mending the strife that has kept Charlie Murder on hiatus for nearly a decade as well as addressing, among other things, bassist Tommy Homicide’s recent hoarding tendencies and guitarist Lester Deth’s addiction to other addictions. After the program’s successful completion, the entire crew will join Ska Studios as “Creative Consultants” to make sure the game stays true to the band’s epic story.

“Yeah, the band is in a tough spot, but we’re signed up for that trendy rehab stuff so we can get paid,” said lead singer Charlie Murder. “We sold out and we’ll do our time in counseling. Just know that we are no longer indie, we are Xbox Live Arcade legit and in 2012 we will have the achievements to prove it.”

For the latest on Charlie Murder, please visit us online at www.ska-studios.com, follow us on Twitter www.twitter.com/skastudios or like us on Facebook www.facebook.com/skastudios.

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!

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

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!

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.

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.