Forgotten Birthdays
Everyone does it. You forget someone’s birthday and feel really bad that you didn’t wish them the happiest day of their lives. We sure did it here, too, at Ska Studios. We forgot the birthdays of our own games: The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai which turned 3 years old on April 1st and The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile turned a whole year old on April 6th!

The Highest Form of Flattery
We like when people like our games. We also like when folks are inspired enough by us to make their own games. When folks simply reskin a tutorial you wrote, leaving all of your characters, weapons, animations, and even combos intact, and put it on the marketplace as their “own vision,” it feels weird.  Sure, James’ book says something to the effect of “you can use this however you want”, but it can’t hurt to at least try to make your own game, right? It’s amusing, if anything else.  And they made weird design choices, like having to hold down two buttons on the same side of the screen, and leaving vibration enabled.

Of course, all of that goodwill is out the window if we discover that Pixels Fury pirated James’ book.  There will be fury indeed, oh yes, if we somehow learn that we have been conned out of, well, I guess just shy of a dollar in royalties.  Which we wouldn’t get anyway because of how things are structured. But… the principle!

If you’d like to make your own reskin of Undead Carnage, you can download the source for the book sample here.  Important bullet points:

• The game is a RAR file. To extract it, remove the .zip extension. There is no good reason for this.
• The game is an XNA 2.0 project. To convert it to 4.0, you’re on your own!  Sorry about that…

More Links We Like
Co-Optimus talks Brawl-PG with a video interview with James.

James Silva is awesome and Side Questing talks about him!

PAX Prime tickets sell out and more rapidly each year. Don’t end up being a sad panda, get your tickets today!

Anyway, we had an amazing PAX East last weekend and we hope you did, too.  Awesome people were met, games were played, tattoos were inked.

Indie MEGABOOTH

We got to be part of the first ever PAX Indie MEGABOOTH, and it was quite the epic success.  We got a great location, tons of traffic, and a pretty cool sense of community.  We even did a Reddit AMA! More MEGABOOTH next PAX? I’m down.

Links

Charlie Murder got a lot of love over the PAX East weekend. Here’s the big rad roundup:

• G4TV forgot to ask us for new art, but nonetheless declared Charlie Murder “the game you need to know about if you are a fan of mayhem and metal.”
• Destructoid won us over with the quote of the millennium: “If Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game made love to the artwork of Jhonen Vasquez, and their baby started eating EVERYTHING, it would probably look something like this.”
• IGDaily and Raze The World put up excellent video interviews. Watch James stammer awkwardly!
• The Show Radio interviewed James (and also used decades-old screenshots! GAHHHH!)
• and Just Press Start and Horror Smorgasbord weighed in too!

James was also on a panel about indie thug life.  There are a couple of clips to behold:  Dejobaan put one up, as did Gameinpublic!  Cool story!

Back to Work

PAX was amazing. We met a lot of cool people, played a ton of Charlie, caught a tiny bit of PAX plague, but… now it’s back to work.  And that is a very, very good thing; there’s still a ton of stuff we need to put in Charlie Murder, it’s just about making it happen now.

“They usually get us to buy them dinner at PAX, and believe me, those dinners start to add up, so we finally crunched the numbers and discovered it would be cheaper to just acquire them outright” said Mike Wilford, Twisted Pixel’s Chief Officer of Mergers and Development.

“We’re excited about the buy-out, and busy planning for future prospects,” said Ska Studios’ Lead Dishwasher James Silva, who evidently will stoop so far as to plagiarize a buy-out response.  Really?!

The well-publicized acquisition of Twisted Pixel by Microsoft Studios led to complications in the Ska Studios acquisition, but the wrinkles ultimately became beneficial: while Twisted Pixel Ska will retain the Twisted Pixel branding, 100% of the ownership will fall to Twisted Pixel’s Assistant Chief User Error Analyst, Mike Henry.

“I’m honestly not sure what happened, something to do with the Scope of Clausal Limitations I think, but this is fine. It’s like owning a team of Roombas, only they have feelings, and can learn human emotions.”  Said Henry, tearing up. “Like love.”

Henry says he plans to use his newfound minions primarily to create “Flash and XBLIG games as gifts for relatives, mostly.”

(Protip: the embedded video is small. Watch it on YouTube for extra definition!)

Who’s Charlie Murder?
We’ve got a site: www.imcharliemurder.com. Currently it’s just got the trailer and some sweet screens, but we promise to get it all sorts of updated with bios, wallpapers, and music.

PAX East Bound
Like the trailer? Play the game! Hate the trailer? You are wrong, sir or madam.  Anyway, we’re demoing an awesome Charlie build at PAX in less than a week!  It’s 4 player coop (and we have drop-in working!), so bring your friends and help us make the game!

Shirts!

Along with the new Charlie Murder build, we’ll also have some sweet new shirts!  We’re printing Charlie Murder shirts in green and gray for the guys and for the first time ever we’ll have a handful of ladies’ sizes in green and pink!  Also, if you missed them the first time around and really, really want one, we’ve got reprints of our Vampire Smile and Z0MB1ES! shirts.  We wear Ska and you should, too, Ska-bros!

Condos! Hatred! Here’s Your Good Morning Gato!

Ha! You thought our cats got along? Hoooo boy. They do not. The above picture captured a crazy deviation from the norm: the event most likely lasted well under ten seconds, after which Neko (above) would’ve begun relentlessly attempting to rid her little two story house of all traces of Gato.  C’mon, cats, you’re sisters! At least pretend you love each other!

Behold: a logo!

Also, there’s a website, but it’s just about as placeholder as you can get.

I ramble more after the break:

We have a To Do List:

I’m working on a trailer for the game; in fact, I’m copying 25 GB of video to my editing rig literally right now (it will probably not be as cool as this one, but c’mon James, drop that defeatist attitude!).  Then we need screenshots and some sort of manifesto-esque press release.  So much has changed since the XBLIG game; it’s turning into something really amazing.  Also, it got violent, dude.

Help us make Charlie Murder!

There were a lot suggestions at PAX Prime when we showed off a much-less-overhauled build, and some of them, like a kickass curb stomp, made it in (thank you, mystery gamer who insisted I add a curb stomp!).  We crave feedback, and even though we might look super surly and tired (and probably sick) when you visit our booth in two weeks, we actually care a great deal about your opinion and think you are a wonderful representative of the human species.  Getting an outside opinion is super important: not only do we not get too many opportunities to do playtesting, but we’re starting to suffer from some serious developer tunnel vision, you know, the point you get to where you have absolutely no idea what your game looks like to anyone else.

This does not count as a Good Morning Gato

Good Morning Gatos must occur on Friday, we mustn’t break protocol!  Here’s a picture of Neko though, hopefully you are now appeased.