Good Morning Gato # 78 – Pumpkin Patterns!

8 Comments October 7, 2011

Charlie Murder Takes The Big Stage With Release On Xbox LIVE Arcade

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.

3 Comments May 5, 2010

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!

25 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.

5 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!

10 Comments March 31, 2008