What is the Skeleton Crew Blog Series

K-Tech Studio has long been invested in being able to create high quality video games. We have been in and around the Open Source game development space for a number of years trying to develop the tools and skill set necessary to make our dream games a reality. Along the way, one of the biggest decisions we had to make was what game engine we would use. We didn’t expect that we would actually end up writing our own.

Recently we had the pleasure of teaming up with another game development group called Spicy Lobster in an effort to make a 2D, single screen, competitive shooter called Jumpy. One of our biggest contributions to Jumpy was the development of the Open Source Bones game engine. Jumpy was intended to have some innovative features that were not readily available in any other Open Source engines. Network play and modding were very important to us for this game, and so was ease of development. True to it’s name, Bones is relatively stripped down. It doesn’t have a lot of unnecessary complication, so it is less overwhelming for our small teams to deal with. Also, it was designed specifically to satisfy our want for network play and modding. The combination of smallness, network capability, and modding support, make Bones a unique option in the realm of Open Source game engines.

However, this is not where we want the story to end. Bones is still a very new game engine that could use many improvements to make it more user friendly and expand it’s capabilities. We have enjoyed our collaboration with Spicy Lobster to create Jumpy, but Bones was also made with our own original game ideas in mind. Because Jumpy shared so much in common with what we already knew we wanted in other games, it was a great benefit to both Spicy Lobster and K-Tech Studio to build Bones for the Jumpy project.

With Bones having proved effective for the development of Jumpy, we are now hoping to start K-Tech Studio projects on top of our fledgling engine. The Skeleton Crew Blog Series is intended to chronicle our efforts to test making new games on top of Bones. Like a skeleton crew, we are few in number, our team of three consisting of Zicklag, the designer and primary developer of Bones game engine, Harsulin, the art and story lead, and Latency, the lead game programmer.

Our small crew is setting sail and we want to take you along for the journey. The Skeleton Crew Blog Series will cover our progress on whatever game we may be working on at the time. We hope to give you a peak into what it is actually like to develop a game, covering everything from technical obstacles that need to be puzzled out, to the tools and techniques that we use to produce the art for our games. We hope you enjoy following along with us!