Polygon Article and general update

 Hey everybody!

The team just got an article over at Polygon, with comments from CoreDev (including Lauren) where we talk a bit about the past, the present and the future of the team. You can go read it by clicking on the header image, or via this link!

You can also take a look at the photos of the team sparkling in the rainbow, which make an already great article even better. We're planning to frame the Nappy one to put into our not-office.

In progress-related news, we're still at it! - The team has been exploring and learning their way on the Z-Engine; Our programmer duo has also been adapting and preparing some additional tools we'll be making use of for the new game, and Lauren and core are still working on character design.

All that said, we apologize for the lack of exciting stuff to talk about. There's been some, actually, but it's more of the "exciting for us as developers" than "exciting for the general public" kind. We were blind and the Z-Engine is showing us the light.

 So we're going to be a bit slow for a month or two, while the train picks up speed, and from then on, full speed ahead!

We're working our collective proverbial off, but any progress in the first stage of game creation (pre-production) might not give as much new exciting stuff to talk about until we get into development proper, in which we'll be talking more as we go through our work, and get to introduce you guys to the new characters and universe we're planning here. We've already got some ideas on how we plan to, actually, and are very excited for the time to come and unveil them. =)

Lastly, a topic we have already touched upon but keeps popping up: We're currently not looking into immediate team expansion. We most likely will, at some point, but for the moment, no solid plans. Still, we thank everyone interested in collaborating with us, and we assure you that once we know the game's specific needs related to workforce, we'll be making any pertinent announcements through this website and our twitter, so please keep following!


As always, thanks to everyone for your interest in our little project.

We loves you.


- The DevTeam

Engine get and three short stories

You guys rock!

 Well, turns out it took us a whole two (or is it three?) days to get over the initial shock, surprise and excitement at Skullgirls' Indiegogo campaign having reached the 725k mark (And beyond!), but we're back with a (mostly text) update of what's going on and what comes up next.

 But first, let us yet again thank everyone of you who donated, spread the word and supported (and still supports) us and the new game. We seriously can't say it enough, but you guys rock, and we can assure you we will -not- disappoint. We pushed the FM2K engine well beyond its limits for the previous project, and we intend to push the Z-Engine likewise (even though the Z-Engine's limits are considerably larger); We intend to give you guys the best game possible for this gift of an engine that you guys (and LabZero) have offered us.

 Since we have gotten the engine (and some before) we have been getting questions about netplay and GGPO. We gave a short explanation of how that would work in a previous post, but we will expand it a bit more here.

725k: The final frontier.

Edit: FUNDED! =) 

Give us a bit to get out of our lack-of-words-at-the-awesomess-that-is-you-guys and we'll post something wordier =3



Hello again, folks!

As you might know already, the Skullgirls' Indiegogo campaign is now in the final stretch, time and money wise. With a bit over 33 hours to go at the moment of this post, the Skullgirls Indiegogo campaign has reached over 650k in crowdfunding, which means that

a) People are awesome
b) Skullgirls gets moar funding
and
c) Our shot at getting the Z-engine to use in our game for free is now closer than ever!

Having said that, we'd like to again invite people to keep on donating and spreading the word, not only because we get the engine at 725k, but also because the guys over at LabZero are FREAKING AWESOME and deserve all the support they can get. Also because they announced earlier on twitter they'd make a playable Robo-Fortune (which by definition has to be the awesomest Fortune ever) also at the 725k goal mark. So that's not one, but TWO reasons to get it there, now! You can donate to them by clicking the site's temporary header, by going to this link, or by clicking on the nifty widget in our sidebar.

We'd also like to, once again, thank everyone still supporting us (And Labzero), and donating to the Indiegogo campaign to make their game grow, and to give ours a chance to grow too!, We really can't say enough how happy we're to have such a great fanbase! You guys rock!

On related news, the last Salty Cupcakes stream before the Indiegogo campaign reaches its end is happening tonight at 8PM PST on this link!, we'd recommend y'all jumped in there; You can ask the Skullgirls team some questions about their game, and you can also fraternize and interact with the Skullgirls community, which are great people to talk with if you're a fighting game fan, or if you would like to get introduced into the wonderful world of beating the candy out of people in fighting games.

Oh, and last, but not least: We were given this link by a friend of a friend, to what we're assured ain't a doomsday countdown, but a live-updated measure of how much time is left to reach the 725k goal, how much has been reached so far, and the average money-per-minute rate needed to 725k before the time's up. We don't know what sorcery this is, but it sure is neat!

Once again, thanks to everyone donating, to everyone spreading the word, and to everyone supporting us (and Labzero!)

We loves you guys.

Salty Cupcakes stream

 Salty Cupcakes Stream @ Twitch.tv

Quick message and shameless otherteam-promotion-but-also-for-our-own-interests:

Salty Cupcakes is a weekly stream featuring the Skullgirls team.

You can ask questions of them and interact with the community a bit. It's a load of fun normally* and we encourage you to check it out at 8PM PST TONIGHT! (That's in an hour from this post)

Skullgirls engine FAQ + teaser

Hey everyone!

We're gonna go over some of the questions regarding the Skullgirls engine licensing drive that's going on RIGHT NOW.

Won't this be a tonne more work?

The bulk of the work (and as labzero can tell you) is going to be art. Concepts, poses, animating, stages, gui. Music, sounds, voices. All of that needs to be redone regardless of engine. Learning a new engine will be a little bit more work, but there are also a lot of rewards for that work, as you'll see right.. HERE:

So what does the Skullgirls engine give you over FM2K?

MikeZ sent us a nice list of benefits that we can share with you:

For the players:

- Widescreen and HD resolution support
- Per-pixel lighting on sprites, a first for ANY 2D engine
- Real shadows    
- 2D and 3D environment support
- Camera zooming
- Negative-edge and multiple-button-input special moves (QCT+PP, etc)
- No corner problems (rapid sprite-flipping, etc)
- Continuous collision: characters don't pass through each other when they shouldn't, no matter how fast they move
- Unlimited palettes per character
- GGPO* integration for seamless, non-delay-based online without a separate client
- Input display, save/load state, dummy record/playback, and all the other Skullgirls training mode features
- Frameskip that still accepts inputs on skipped frames, eliminating timing-based problems such as unblockables or dropped combos

For the developers:

- Full source code and any existing development tools; the ability to fix any problems with the engine themselves instead of having to just DealWithIt
- Tech support
- Future engine revisions and bugfixes
- HLSL shader support - any graphical effects your little heart desires can be created
- In-game palette editor, customizeable debug keys and many other time-saving features
- A scripting system written in plain English, with move motions written in regular fighting game notation and a robust munge tool
- The ability for sprites to tell when they have left the screen, rather than just the stage
- Support for 32-bit (i.e. truecolor, unpalettized) art for sprites when necessary, and mixing of truecolor and palettized frames
- Support for teams/assists and a console release, if ever desired

So lots of good stuff that we'd love to play with.

*GGPO?

GGPO basically lets the game be played multiplayer over a network. It's widely regarded as the best networking software for fighting games. SUPPORT for GGPO is included in the SG engine, but if we want to actually use it we'd have to purchase it separately. And yes, we would very much like to do that if we get the SG engine, because having good network multiplayer is extremely important to us!

Will it run on my crappy computer?

Short answer is that we don't know. MikeZ develops on his less-than-stellar laptop and it runs fine, but we don't know the exact system requirements yet.

Are you going to put the game on steam/ps3/360 if you get the engine?

Another one we don't know yet. All we know is that the SG engine would make all of those options open to us.

Isn't 725k really expensive?

Well, that's not the price of the license. That's just a stretch goal of their campaign that would mean we get it for free. It's just the easiest and quickest option for our team.

Why can't I just donate to you guys instead!

If we start accepting money, the SG engine would probably be one of the first items on our shopping list anyway, so some of the the money would go to labzero one way or another. As mentioned above, the stretch goal option cuts out a lot of the complication involved with that.

Will this mean it will play like skullgirls?

Not at all! Well.. apart from it being a 2D fighter. The engine is just a tool. Gears of War, Arkham Asylum, and Mortal Kombat 9 were all built on Unreal engine, but they are drastically different. Plus, as we've mentioned, we want to keep our already developed gameplay ideas mostly intact. Also, there is nothing in the SG engine that says it only works for certain kinds of characters (like 2-legged), just as there was nothing in FM2K that made it better for our 4-legged characters!

Is it Galaxy Girls? It's Galaxy Girls isn't it.

While we agree that the Galaxy Girls are kickass, Lauren is designing new characters for us. Like, NEW new, not old new. We meet with Lauren every week to talk about and develop these new characters together.




Speaking of which, we think it might be cool to show you guys three of the character concepts we've come up with so far. We thought it would be fun to show you them in silhouette form first. See if you guys can figure out who's who and what's what!


Enjoy!