2008 September

Want to see what the Flashbang/Blurst offices look like?  This weekend we’ve been hosting the inaugural TIGJam, a gathering of indie game developers.  Check out project status updates over at TIGJam.com, or spy on us via a 24/7 video stream:

Live Video streaming by Ustream

Hey Everyone!  I’m Matthew.  I do programming, physics, and all of the web integration stuff here at Blurst.  But more on that later.

Whew! What a week.  Due to time constraints with our contract jobs–we’re saving up cash to focus on Blurst nonstop through the end of 2009–we weren’t able to get started on Blurst as early as we wanted.  I actually didn’t start in on the actual site coding until this Thursday.  Thanks to the power of late nights, we were able to finish this first version in under a week.

This version isn’t perfect.  In fact, it’s far from it.  We’re calling this a soft launch, which means that we won’t be announcing it anywhere, or redirecting games from our their existing homes just yet.  There are obvious holes where functionality is missing, and likely problems with the games themselves.  We’re glad you found us, but we aren’t fretting about getting the word out just yet.  After all, if you were to find us tomorrow instead, we’d have more done.

I expect everything else to come online very quickly, now that the foundation is place.  In the meantime, feel free to email us if you uncover any issues, or have suggestions.  We love hearing from players!

Hello! This is Ben, the Art Director at Flashbang Studios. I’m extremely happy to be writing this right now, as it means Jetpack Brontosaurus is ready for you to play, exploit, make tightly edited music videos from, lie about beating, or whatever it is you do with games you play. Whatever, it’s not my business.

But I actually wanted to talk a little about the product on a personal and artistic level, because both its origins and its creation were remarkable. Earlier in the year I was doodling on one of our many whiteboards (whiteboards are a fantastic creative device, by the way). We were still working on Off-Road Velociraptor Safari at the time, so I had Dinosaurs on the brain a little bit more than usual. I ended up drawing an ambiguous long necked dinosaur with large conical boosters on it’s back. I’m not sure why, all I remember is that I was thinking of old muscle cars, specifically the Neutrino’s flying car from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But my co-workers loved it! It was not something I had intended to do, I was really just drawing for fun/exercise. But that’s how it started. It’s an iconic example of our philosophy at work; sometimes things are just accidentally awesome. And accidentally awesome is our style of opportunity.

We ended up attaching the idea of an Appatosaurus that yearns to fly, and does so in his dreams with the aid of strange future machines. With this in mind, our main directive was to pursue a non-photo realistic, dream like aesthetic, and this is where a lot of the imagery of the game derives from. Art and Tech collaborated to create the post-processing effects you see in the game that not only distort the view of the playfield, but transitions between nightmare and dream states. Luckily for us, our programmers supported our ridiculous ideas like warriors. Setting up every single object in every scene was such a mess that there would have been a blood bath had they been any less cool. Because of a few other time consuming factors such as this, it ended up taking a little longer to wrap up than we hoped, but we ended up with a really interesting art piece of a product that taught us a lot about our development environment.

But it’s here now, so give it a try. I realize some of you have already played the Alpha we released earlier in the year. Since then we have tweaked the controls, tightened up the camera behavior, and added 3 worlds in addition to the one that was was playable.

Go! Explore the dream world! Eat succulent floating fruit!