Good evening passengers, this is your Captain Kevyn speaking. Thank you for joining me for this introductory blog post.

The idea for Help! I’m Haunted was borne of the Large Hadron Collision of Pixel’s Kero Blaster, the George and Jonathon track Sludge Mansion, and a healthy respect for the work of New York’s Bravest; the Ghostbusters.

The plan was that by utilising my strength at pixel art, working at a small resolution and having a simple retro design we would be able to finish the game by Halloween (2 Halloweens have passed since then). It has been a long journey on a retrospectively very ambitious first project, but very soon you will be able to play it!

My work on Help! I’m Haunted includes art for characters, UI and effects as well as programming everything. While I’ve been doing pixel art since I was a kid, I’d only scripted a few small prototypes before this and after rolling up me sleeves and getting to work I’ve learned an incredible amount (although my tip to budding developers would be to start with something much smaller). Here! Look at some monsters that didn’t make it in the game!

During this project I’ve been using handy pixel art program Pyxel to quickly draft designs and animations without having to deal with an elaborate animation editor. You just line your frames up next to each other in the grid and the animator will just play them in a row. It doesn’t have a lot of indepth animation tools, holding different frames for different amounts of time for example, but what it lacked in that regard it definitely makes up for by being lightweight and convenient. I was almost always able to just copy from the canvas straight into a sprite atlas, making implementing animations quick and easy. Pyxel has become my go to pixel editor, usurping (I kid you not) Microsoft Paint, but Paint’s secret strength is the same as Pyxels, it has all the essential tools I need without having to deal with lag or crashes from tools I might never use. Thanks Pyxel!

In the future I’ll do some blog posts about mistakes we made during development, and something I focused on in Help! I’m Haunted; Game feel and microsecond to microsecond gameplay. Bye bye! I’m a pirate, bye!

Ahoy, scurvy landlubbers! Welcome to our first official blog post. Though we have been very quiet until now, everyone here at Sky Pirate Studios has been working very hard to plunder the most excellent artisanal pixels to present to you in the form of our first game – Help! I’m Haunted.

So before we crack open our heads and feast all the gooey innards, I’d like to take the time to introduce myself in the first of our introduction blog posts.

I am your Captain, Joey. I do a lot of the level tiles and design, as well as other game design duties such as communing with ancient sea gods. They love video games.

My journey in this crew started when my co-worker Kevyn and I finished university and decided that we wanted create a pirate empire the world had never seen the likes of before. However, when we quickly realized this was impossible and possibly very illegal, we settled on starting an indie studio to make fun games that we can laugh at and have fun with.

Currently I’m drowning in a sea of pixels that run through each of our levels, all the while improving each enemy encounter and squashing levels bugs.

As you may be able to tell, my main influences for this project (and the level design therein) has primarily been the first three Castlevania games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Those games just knew how to design encounters, and they had some damn fine background tiles.

Though I’d like to keep this introductory post short and sweet, I’d like to conclude by saying a big thank you for all the continued support from friends and family, as well as everyone who has been supporting us and our project. We’d like to thank Film Victoria especially for their support, as their funding has not only has greatly assisted with the marketing of Help! I’m Haunted, but has also given us a much needed moral boost. Now that things are really picking up for us we want communication with you guys to be much more consistent, so we’re looking forward to showing off a lot more cool stuff that we’ve been working on very soon.

With that, I’m heading below deck to load up some cannons. Until next time!