Though the game wasn’t a sensation, Skullgirls was a solid, well-reviewed indie fighting game that found a home on the PlayStation Network and Xbox LIVE Arcade. The game itself was an ode to fighting games, created by fans and professionals of the fighting game genre. It featured a unique, twisted art style and eight playable characters who were finely tuned and balanced for competitive fighting. The game even featured an in-depth tutorial that takes players through all of the intricate details of high-end video game fighting that aren’t normally taught to the average gamer.

Now, the creators of Skullgirls have founded their own game studio, Lab Zero Games. The studio’s website so far only consists of its announcement statement, but Twitter and Facebook pages have also been created. In a statement, the studio promised to continue its work on Skullgirls and “leverage its unique design and artistic sensibilities to develop new games.”

The studio came about after the entire Skullgirls team was laid off from their jobs at Reverge Labs. The incident has delayed work on the PC version of Skullgirls, and “indefinitely delayed” the first DLC character for the game. From the Lab Zero statement:

To try to prevent such calamities from befalling us, our games, or our fans again, the Skullgirls team decided to form its own studio.

Autumn Games, the publisher and owner of the Skullgirls property, is fully behind the new studio and will continue to work with us in the future on all Skullgirls-related endeavors, such as the just-released patch, more merchandise and a few other things we can’t quite announce yet…

…Not being able to tell anyone about these rather significant developments has almost been as bad as being largely unemployed and unable to continue our work on Skullgirls. We have always strived to be as open and transparent as our business and legal obligations will allow, but we feared news of these events would discourage our fans more than our conspicuous silence would. Being able to finally fill everyone in on everything is a huge relief, and we hope you understand our reasons for keeping quiet until now.

Lab Zero said that the team hasn’t given up and has promised to resume work on Skullgirls as soon as possible.