Comic-Con!
Here’s your friendly neighborhood reminder that we’ll be in San Diego next week for Comic-Con, exhibiting with The Behemoth and other fabulous indies at booth 229. Expo days are the 20th through the 23rd with a preview day on the 19th.
Shirts!
We have some more Salt and Sanctuary shirt sizes in stock including more 2XL and ladies cut small through XL. You can throw money at your screen at our merch shop, store.ska-studios.com and music, music.ska-studios.com. We’ll also have theSalt and Sanctuary shirts for sale at Comic-Con!
This year, The Behemoth is welcoming some friends to join their booth and those friends include us! Next month, July 19 – July 23, we will be breathing the same air as everyone else attending SDCC and showing off Salt and Sanctuary and selling a few shirts! See you there in Hall A at Booth 229!
“Pretty dang soon” is upon us this Friday! Charlie Murder and The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile will be available on Windows, Mac and Linux May 12th, 2017! They will be $9.99 USD and for the first time ever, we will have a “Skallection” bundle which will give a 15% discount for our three Steam games. The discount will also apply to two if you already own one.
If you aren’t familiar with our older Xbox Live Arcade titles, Charlie Murder is a punk rock apocalypse! Team up with your friends to lead fallen punk rock band Charlie Murder in their epic quest to save the world from rival death metalers Gore Quaffer and their legions of evil in an RPG brawler hybrid inspired in equal parts by coin-op beat ’em ups and dungeon crawlers.. RPG it up as you hoard insane loot to buff your character (and look excellent), earn fans to unlock powerful finishers and team-up moves, get tattoos to channel your “Anar-Chi,” and uncover mysterious relics of modern myth!
Charlie Murder originally launched on Xbox 360 August 14th, 2013.
Play The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile to dig further in to Yuki’s bloody quest for revenge. The game features the Dishwasher’s campaign storyline, online and offline coop play, 50 Arcade Challenges and Dish Challenge, including a ton of nasty new weapons and techniques.
The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile originally launched on Xbox 360 April 6, 2011.
Salt and Sanctuary is now available on PlayStation®Vita! If you don’t already own it, you can buy it on the PlayStation store here.
Update: The Europe version is now live, too!
Unfortunately, last minute issues are causing the Europe version to be delayed. We are so sorry about this delay and working to get it available as soon as possible. I’ll update here and on our social medias once we know more. Follow us at @skastudios@shelldragon@jamezila.
Cross-Buy Workaround
If you purchased Salt and Sanctuary on PS4 previously, you should be able to download the game on PSVita for free. However, we’ve been informed that this isn’t showing up for some people. Sony gave us a temporary workaround: re-downloading the game on your PS4 will cause the Vita version to unlock. Some people are also having luck queuing up the download from the PlayStation Store on the web. They’re working to get it sorted out so it just works, but the workaround at least means you won’t be buying the game twice.
Bugs
While we hope everyone will enjoy our Vita launch, there are some launch issues to be aware of that Sickhead Games and we are working on.
Crashing in various places such as Hagar’s Cavern and Ruined Temple – looking into this asap
Online features, such as messages and tombstones, are disabled at the moment
Logos and icon on the launch loading screens flicker
The launch loading screen just takes too long!
The store is showing the game as available on PS3 – I’m told this is referencing PS3 > Vita remote play
I’ll be adding to our known issues list here as I can!
Thanks everyone and happy playing and again so many apologies for the delay and the cross-buy issue. For those who are unsure, the cross-buy promotion is through the PlayStation Network for PS4 and PSVita. Sorry for the confusion.
It’s been long. But despair not, the wait is nearly at an end.
We launched Salt and Sanctuary one entire year ago on Playstation 4. Our dreary, heavily Souls-inspired 2D action RPG was incredibly well received, and while we’ve been overjoyed and overwhelmed by the range of emotions your feedback held — excitement! Frustration! Enthusiasm! Rage! — we felt your resounding reminder of a promise we made in our very first trailer: that Salt and Sanctuary would come to Playstation Vita.
We’re Ska Studios, a two-person husband and wife studio that lives somewhere around Seattle, and Salt and Sanctuary is our fourth major game. Salt and Sanctuary is our studios’ heartfelt love letter to the Souls series: a 2D platforming dark RPG that seeks to capture the danger and mystery of a haunted, unforgiving world, the freedom of exploration and customization, and the weight of your choices meaningfully impacting each playthrough in significant ways.
Would you believe we originally were aiming to launch on Vita and PS4 at the same time? After all, a complex, deep, ARPG like Salt and Sanctuary would be a perfect fit for Vita. We may have been overambitious — reckless even! But we think the wait will be worth it, and we hope you’ll agree when Salt and Sanctuary finally launches on PS Vita this coming Tuesday, March 28 for Americas and Europe with Japan coming soon.
Ska and Sickhead
Salt and Sanctuary for Vita marks the first Ska Studios title that… well… we didn’t make! That honor goes to Sickhead Games, the studio behind the console ports of Stardew Valley, Darkest Dungeons, Axiom Verge and more. Not only is Sickhead Games responsible for our Vita port, but they’re the ones behind MonoGame for Vita, without which Vita wouldn’t have received ports of TowerFall and Axiom Verge, which Sickhead also did. They’re as talented as they are overworked.
We had a small hand in the port: nudging some HUD elements here, tightening up the camera there, tweaking an effect or two when we needed to, but our contribution on the Vita port was pretty minimal. The fantastic, talented folks at Sickhead Games were the ones behind all of the low-level, nightmare-inducing logic that will make games like Salt and Sanctuary on Vita even possible.
Cross-buy, and thanks!
As promised, Salt and Sanctuary will be cross-buy across Vita and Playstation 4. If you bought it a year ago for Playstation 4, when it launches on Vita, you’ll already own it!
Of course, a big thank you to you for your patience and support. No game studio can survive without the respect of its customers, and the last thing we want is to feel like we’re letting you down. You’ve all been so awesome. Keep expunging heretics, making OP builds, doing naked level 1 runs, and abusing glitches. Above all, keep surviving.
