I should start a blog
But really, I’d like to make more frequent updates. Ska Studios turns 19 this year, and I’ve more or less forgotten how to maintain an online presence. So let’s dust this blog off and see:
- Do I remember how to use this site?
- Does this site email people on a mailing list whenever I post an update?
- Is there a mailing list?
Some Dishwasher: Dead Samurai news
Ever since the Xbox360 store shut down, I’ve gotten a few emails per month asking about The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai. The original game launched 17 years ago exclusively on Xbox360, but was unfortunately never granted backwards compatibility, rendering it completely inaccessible upon the shuttering of the Xbox360 store. But the good news is that it will be coming to Steam!
The bad/less-good news is that this won’t be a remaster, it won’t contain new content (unless you count keyboard remapping as content), and I don’t have any idea as to the timeline. I’m not handling the port, and it’s a very part time endeavor for the guy who is.
Even prior to the shutdown of the 360 marketplace, I’ve wanted to do something with Dead Samurai, but I’d always end up in a sort of remaster choice paralysis. I didn’t have it ported in the first place because it’s so fraught with blurry textures (I originally was developing it locked at 800×600), and not knowing how any of my 360 games would perform on Steam, it seemed wise to throw money at the ones that would upscale to 1080p better.
The animation systems and quality in my newer games is leagues beyond Dead Samurai. Salt and Sacrifice supports full skeletal IK, and while Dead Samurai characters are made up of about six pieces sourced from fixed grid (e.g. torso, head, straight arm, a bent arm, legs, sword), the hero character in Sacrifice contains 17 sourced from a custom atlas, with each arm and leg articulated into 3 segments.
In fact, here’s a breakdown of the animation system improvements:
- Dead Samurai: base
- Vampire Smile: added linear interpolation
- Charlie Murder: custom atlases
- Salt and Sanctuary: parent-child hierarchy
- Salt and Sacrifice: IK implemented in-editor, atlas system allows complex linking of sprites for things like rope, cloth, dangly stuff
- Mysterious New Game: IK implemented in-game so feet actually work on slopes correctly
So it’s hard to go from MNG to Dead Samurai without wanting to bring some of the cool new improvements back. And if I rigged the MNG system into Dead Samurai, I’d need to up-res and clean up all the source images, add more variations, then re-do all the animations (programmatically at first but then manually tweaking thousands of frames)… and then I’d have to do the same for the world map.
So that’s where my mentality was at when the 360 store shut down and Dead Samurai became unavailable to anyone in the world. And at that point, it seemed like a better idea to just get the thing on Steam than to keep dwelling on what remastering it might entail. I’ve taken to referring to it mentally as The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai Preservation Edition, because that’s really all it is.
And it’ll probably $10, which is $6.46 in 2009 dollars.
