Charlie Murder is a beat'em up, but with a few twist. Throughout the campaign you and your friends whether it be local or online will be able to craft beer, get better gear, and of course level up. Charles 'Charlie' Murder, the leader and main vocalist of his band of the same name, is a punk rocker all his own. During the ending credits of the Bad Ending it is revealed that Charlie and Paul grew up together. During the Good Ending of the game it is revealed that Charlie and Kelly get married. Charlie, explaining why they withheld the actual surveillance footage that shows Maureen accidentally falling to her death: “People don’t want to see that, because it’s hard evidence. It’s better to actually sit on that evidence until, like, episode 10.” Mac: “It’s like eating a bag of chips. It’s a punk rock apocalypse! Team up with your friends to lead embattled punk rock band Charlie Murder in their epic quest to save the world from rival death metalers Gore Quaffer and their legions of evil.

How Ska Studios' gore-drenched indie brawler paved the path for a special union.

Precious few people could manage to turn a gruesome, ultraviolent game about dismembering undead hordes with their own severed limbs into a grand romantic gesture. James Silva pulled it off, though — surprising his girlfriend and game development partner Michelle Juett with an in-game wedding proposal right on the PAX 2011 show floor in front of a bustling crowd of onlookers.

It was a Charlie Murder demo session neither member of Ska Studios will forget.

'I made a little cutscene where in-game me proposed to in-game Michelle and all of our characters were in the game crowded around watching,' he recalls, adding that he covertly notified a bunch of their friends, telling them to gather at the game's demo booth at 3 p.m. that Saturday. 'It was one of the most exciting yet terrifying things I've ever done,' he says.

Juett suspected some kind of sneakery was afoot. 'I think the surprise was that there were so many people around us,' she says. 'I sort of had a hint he was doing something suspicious because he was acting super weird all weekend.'

When the time came to pop the question, Silva booted up the special version of the game, started playing, got to the critical cutscene, hit the A button, dropped to one knee and produced the ring.

'I had to press A for the animation for when you accepted,' he chuckles slyly to his wife of just over a year during our phone interview. 'I didn't make an animation for if you shot me down.'

Beneath the crazy blood-soaked haze and outlandish antics, there's a surprisingly tender side to the tale of Charlie Murder that binds its creators together beyond coding and creativity.

The studio that almost wasn't

When Silva first began exploring his childhood dream of making games for a living over a decade ago, there was no such thing as 'indie' in the gaming world — at least not in the same sense as it exists today. 'Back then it was called shareware and nobody wanted it,' he quips in a not-quite-joking tone.

'I remember when I was a teenager I made a thing on [Macintosh application-programming tool] HyperCard ... called Mortal Wombat 2,' Silva says. 'I uploaded it to AOL, and I had 400 people download it. I was like 'this is awesome!' He was hooked.

College proved to be a perfect opportunity to play around with a broad range of game design experiments. Silva crafted code as a hobbyist developer in his spare time, even finding inventive ways to occasionally submit completed games instead of dull reports for his final class projects. He carved out additional blocks of development time whenever he could afford to blow off class work. But when graduation rolled around, his bubble burst. It was time to hunker down and try to earn a living.

'I got a job doing applications development, which would have been a just fine 'real job,' but within the first two months it became this soul-crushing thing,' he says. 'What I realized was that when I got home every night I didn't have enough time or energy to work on games for fun.'

'I remember when I was a teenager I made a thing on HyperCard ... called Mortal Wombat 2.'

That year — 2007 — was off to a rough start. With zero time to work on his game projects and a waning spirit, he begrudgingly convinced himself to give up on making games. It was a depressing prospect. 'I basically had accepted at that point that it wasn't going to be a part of my life,' he says. Then he got the news that would change everything.

Silva had just won Microsoft's Dream.Build.Play Challenge with The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai — a game he had tinkered away at over the years and then revamped over the course of four months entirely for the competition. The project scored him an Xbox Live Arcade publishing contract and the start-up cash needed to steer his aspirations back on course. But perhaps more importantly, it set the stage for an eventual chance encounter with his future wife.

A match made at PAX

James Silva proposes to Michelle Juett at their Charlie Murder demo booth during PAX 2011.

In her first game industry job, Michelle Juett worked as a game tester putting Xbox Live Arcade titles through their paces. It was around 2008, and one of the games that came through the lab was The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai. She was impressed.

'It was a really exciting time in the labs, because usually we'd get [less thrilling] games that'd come through,' Juett recalls, noting she also thought it was cool that the game was made by only one guy. 'There's a lot of just ... stuff ... on there, and this was more of an action game, which is kind of what we liked to play.'

Living on opposite coasts, Juett and Silva met in person for the first time in Seattle during the 2009 Penny Arcade Expo. They kept in touch, started playing games together online, and officially began dating about a year later. Before long, Juett moved to Schenectady, N.Y. to be with Silva, later joining Ska Studios in an official capacity as an artist and marketing manager.

'We had to try not to hurt each other's feelings because we do work with each other and live with each other all day.'

Being a couple is one thing, but settling into making games together has been an ongoing evolution for the pair. 'It makes it more iterative of a process,' Juett says. While Silva does all of the programming, they now share in the art duties, bounce ideas back and forth, and add their own personal touches to each project in other ways.

'It's getting better, but it was more challenging at first,' she says, of their collaborative working relationship. 'We had to try not to hurt each other's feelings because we do work with each other and live with each other all day.'

Working on Charlie Murder, Juett spent a lot of time fine-tuning and polishing the art, while also designing many of the game's gruesome monsters and all of the zany costumes characters can wear. She even contributed vocals to the game's soundtrack and supplies the voice of one of the earlier bosses — a psychotic dude in a giant cheeseburger suit. It's a performance she's particularly proud of.

Occasionally, however, she worries that her creative influences will negatively affect the studio's established routine and turn off the fan base Silva built on the back of his previous solo games. It's something that sits in the back of her mind at times, as she's working alongside her husband.

Of course, he doesn't see it that way at all, saying, 'I just want her to be creative and not worry about the impact.' Silva readily admits that art isn't his strong suit, and says that's one area in particular where Juett's creative touch really shines.

Despite their openness about the insecurities and challenges that come from easing into a work relationship alongside their personal one, the couple doesn't let these difficulties show in their creative work, which is woven with crazy, over-the-top antics.

Zombies, brews and tattoos

When you rip off a zombie's arm and club it back to death, the last thing you expect to see drop out of its rotting corpse are the in

How Ska Studios' gore-drenched indie brawler paved the path for a special union.

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