Ska Studios is an independent game development studio founded by James Silva in 2007 after winning a contract to publish '' The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai'' to

Xbox Live Arcade Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) is a digital video game download service available through the Xbox Games Store, Microsoft's digital distribution network for the Xbox 360. It focuses on smaller downloadable games from both major publishers and independent ...

. Ska Studios has released four Metacritic-aggregated console games since then, more than any similarly sized studio. Ska Studios currently consists of James Silva. The studio is well known in

indie gaming An indie game, short for independent video game, is a video game typically created by individuals or smaller development teams without the financial and technical support of a large game publisher, in contrast to most "AAA" (triple-A) games. ...

for its art style, which is described as cartoonish, grim, and gory, and its games' tight controls. Many of the studio's games are strongly inspired by modern action titles, such as ''

Devil May Cry is a series of action-adventure games created by Hideki Kamiya. It is primarily developed and published by Capcom. The series centers on the demon hunter Dante and his efforts to thwart various demon invasions of Earth. Its gameplay consists o ...

'', '' Ninja Gaiden Black'', and ''

Dark Souls is a series of action role-playing games created by Hidetaka Miyazaki of FromSoftware and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment. The series began with the release of '' Dark Souls'' (2011) and has seen two sequels, ''Dark Souls II'' (2014) ...

''.

Games

History

James Silva began making games as a hobby in 2001, starting with Zombie Smashers X, a River City Ransom style beat-em'-up game, but the title was financially unsuccessful, selling fewer than 100 units. James went on to develop more similarly unsuccessful titles, including Blood Zero, Zombie Smashers X2, and Survival Crisis Z, but didn't achieve viable commercial success until 8 years later, with 2009's ''The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai''.

Development

All of Ska Studios' currently released games are built using the XNA framework or its open-source cross platform counterpart, MonoGame. When Xbox One launched with no XNA support, Ska Studios made the switch to PlayStation 4, with ''Salt and Sanctuary'' being the studio's first title to launch on a non-Microsoft console. Regarding the change, James said:

"The engineering side of it was an issue. All of our code is .NET/XNA, and, even though XNA support has ended, .NET games can use open source wrappers like MonoGame and FNA to carry the torch. But Xbox One has no .NET support. PS4 does, with titles like ''Towerfall: Ascension'' and ''Transistor'' using MonoGame in one form or another to deploy to PS4."

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://ska-studios.com/ Video game companies established in 2007 Video game companies of the United States Video game development companies Companies based in Seattle 2007 establishments in Washington (state) Indie game developers