2008 October

Things have been a little quiet here, but with good reason!  The whole team was over in Copenhagen, Denmark, for Unity’s second annual Unite conference.  It was three days of technical sessions, including a physics talk by yours truly (video should be posted soon).  The weekend after the conference we hung out at the Unity offices, jamming on random game ideas.  The trip was well worth it.

Phil Harrison Keynote

The conference started off with the company founders announcing their 2.5 plans (Windows editor!), before stepping aside aside to let Phil Harrison give his thoughts on the industry.  This was surprisingly relevant to us.  Phil is currently the president of Atari, but he was at the conference to give a broad overview of where he thinks the game industry is going.  Gamasutra has a write-up here.

I honestly thought he could have been talking about Blurst several times during the keynote.  In particular, Phil was promoting developing games “in the full glare of the gaming public”, moving quickly and failing early by getting ideas playable immediately, monetizing games over time rather than with one big retail push, and utilizing game analytics in the same way that Web 2.0 relied on analytics to optimize sites and services.

We’re doing a lot of this already.  The original plan for Blurst was to use it as a mechanism to see which of our game ideas were accepted by gamers.  We would release glorified prototypes as fast as we could, as often as we could, and then take a step back and pick the most trafficked game for further development (PC download, XBLA, WiiWare, etc).  In thinking more about the site, though, we decided it would make more sense to build a model around an 8-week development timeframe.  The site today, as we envision it, is actually an end unto itself, rather than a means to a different end.  We’re going to focus more on aspects like achievements, leaderboards, and friend lists.

Instead of viewing the site as a support model that feeds into a download or retail premium game model, we now view it as its own standalone entity.  We are no longer going to take that step back; instead, Blurst will just keep going with a collection of small, interesting games.  The plan is to monetize the site in 2009 andmake it our primary source of revenue.

Analytics

We capture a ton of data already, although I think analytics are much more useful to optimize one product over a long period of time, rather than a bunch of disjoint games.  For instance, analytics are hugely important if you want to balance maps in a multiplayer shooters or to stabalize economies in MMOs.

We have a scrolling LED sign in the office that constantly lists numbers from our games–4,817,823 raptors killed, 61,074,141 balls fired in Splume–but most of this data isn’t fed back into our development process yet.  In Raptor Safari we have a record of every scoring event: 22,840,726 records that include location in the game world, what time of scoring event it was, and what time it happened in the game.  When we do revisit Raptor Safari, we’ll use this to heatmap different events.  Where are the highest-scoring jumps?  Where do players kill pteranodons?  Which catchers are used the most?

Sharing Technology

We regularly speak at conferences, and we put a lot of effort into our talks.  We feel that it’s important to share lessons learned so that other developers can get a head start.  Today we unveiled technology.blurst.com, which will contain a steady trickle of code snippets, scripts, and tutorials from our developers.  It will be fairly Unity-centric, but if you’re interested in game development you should definitely check it out (and if you are a game dev, but not using Unity, you owe it to yourself to look into the technology)!

November Launches!

November is going to be a big month here at Blurst.  Minotaur China Shop will finally launch, along with the remainder of the Blurst web features.  We also have three iPhone games in development with Unity’s iPhone support.  We plan to submit all three to the App Store in November.  We’re also wrapping up the last contract job we’ll be doing for some time.

December will be a month of recovery for us, along with some light prototyping.  And then before we know it we’ll be in 2009!  We’re very excited about next year.  The company will be exclusively focused on Blurst, and it’s going to rock.  The 8-week schedule begins in earnest on January 1st.  We will have game launches on March 1st, May 1st, July 1st, September 1st, November 1st, and December 31st.

P.S. We haven’t put a fatty logo anywhere for it yet, but you can follow us on Twitter.  Please do!

Unity, the the engine technology we use, is holding their second Unity Awards. We actually took home first place last year with Splume, and this year we’ve entered all of our new games (Raptor Safari, Jetpack Brontosaurus, and Minotaur China Shop).  Audience voting determines the Forum Favorite award, which is worth a cool 1,000 euros. There are some great games in the lineup, so go check them out and cast your vote!  It’s worth the I Voted achievement ;)

A vote for Raptor Safari would be appreciated, of course, but make sure you check out Tumbledrop and RastaMonkey, both excellent physics games.  There are a lot of games to play, and most of these are in development and worth keeping an eye on!

Time for my little introduction. I’m Shawn, one of the Flashbang programmers. Like the other programmers here I do pretty much anything that needs to be done, but my specialty is graphics programming. When we need interdimensional jetpack exhaust, balls that looks like candy, a china shop to become hellish, or a graphics engine made in a week, I’m the guy that makes it happen. In other words, it’s my job to make the games look “next gen” … whatever that means. It’s also my job to make these awesome “next gen” games work on your hundred-year-old computers. :( I also spend much of my free time making cool little demos which I end up putting up on my blog.

I started working at Flashbang as an intern back in April of ‘07 when I found Steve through the Art Institutes as a student. I first worked with Steve on a student project in which he was the Faculty Advisor. We literally slaved with four other students for months to make Shanke, a 3D physics based jousting game, for the Art Institutes. Shanke went on to be displayed for the Art Institutes at Siggraph and the Game Developers Conference.

Y’all will mostly see me rambling on about new and exciting graphics tech here. The Unity engine along with their webplayer has enabled us to take web-based games into the realm of “next gen.” No longer are we stuck with the graphical limitations of Flash in order to bring awesome games for FREE to the internet. I know I’m excited to be making these awesome beautiful games.

If you have any questions or comments for me, whether it be about what I do or about one of our games, then leave a comment and let me know!

Go Kill Some Raptors!
~Shawn

In addition to Minotaur China Shop (soon, we swear), and the rest of the community features here on Blurst, we’re also working on three iPhone games slated for November launch.  Check out the Singularity Cannon in !Rebolt!, a sweet robot-combat game by the Mechtley brothers:

!Rebolt! Singularity Cannon Trailer from Matt Mechtley on Vimeo.

Hey there! I briefly introduced myself in the soft launch post, but here’s a bit more detail: I’m Matthew Wegner. I was one of the original four founders of Flashbang Studios, five and a half years ago, and the only remaining founder at the company today. My official title at Flashbang is CEO, although truth be told we have a fairly flat structure for day-to-day activity. Being CEO means I think a lot about the high-level focus of the company, with questions like: How much time should we spend on contract work? How much attention do we give the iPhone? How much cash do we have on hand? Can we hire someone else? Should we hire someone else? How much time should we put into each Blurst game?

There are nitty-gritty details, as well, like handling business development and correspondence, payroll, paying bills, and setting up travel for conferences. Most of this kind of stuff isn’t terribly exciting, but it has to be done. If you guys have any questions about what it takes to start up the business side of business, though, feel free to hit me up. My email is matthew at blurst.com (everyone else’s email follows the same pattern, btw–just firstname@blurst).

It’s telling that I’m starting out my third paragraph with nary of mention of actual game development. In fact, I’m constantly frustrated that I’m not able to do more on our games with more of my time. This isn’t necessarily bad, since it’s one reason I’m so driven, but I do end most of my days wishing I could have accomplished more. I generally have a backlog of tasks, and sometimes it’s hard to ignore what other people are working on–especially when they’re working on cool stuff–because my own list of tasks is getting too long.

I have a fascination with physics games, and spend a lot of my time working on the physics setup and balancing in our games. I did the core physics behavior in Splume, as well as the jeep/chain physics in Off-Road Velociraptor Safari. I wasn’t quite as involved with Jetpack Brontosaurus, partly because I was off unicycling across Vietnam for a whole month, but expect more physics-y goodness from me in the future. I’m the guy behind Fun-Motion, a site focused on physics games (with 80 reviews and counting, albeit counting more slowly these days).

From a technical standpoint, I act as our lead programmer and oversee our programming work, our Unity workflow and best practices, as well as all of our web/database integration. Unity is a pretty amazing piece of technology. I’m always open to discussing its merits, for anyone who’d like to know. Just email me!

Finally, I’m also fairly active in the larger independent game development scene. I recently planned TIGJam, a game jam for the TIGSource community. I also act as a content director for the Independent Games Festival, which means I do a lot of planning and logistics behind the judging process, and I’m an advisor to the Independent Games Summit, a 2-day event for indie games held during the Game Developer’s Conference.

Hello.

I am Steve, and I am zee game designer. At least, that’s what it says on my business card. As does everyone at Flashbang, I tend to wear multiple hats. On Splume I wore the Level Design hat. On Raptor Safari, I wore the sound design hat. On Mysterious Upcoming Projects I’ll be wearing more of a game design and music hat. I wish I had a stronger neck. Hats start to add up, and I’ve begun to cultivate a hunch. All I need now is a goiter and I can be a true freak mutant.

*gobbles table salt*

Oh! I see you’re still reading. Unlucky day! Um, well, lessee…I just finished writing a book. That’s pretty cool, amirite? It’s about game feel. You can find more information about it here. Actually, scratch that. Just make an impulse purchase on Amazon. Boom! Zap! Buy! Sales rank #1,135,144, here I come!

I came to Flashbang as so many others did, a refugee from the perils of the retail game industry. I worked at a place called Tremor, on an Xbox exclusive action RPG thing with the title “The Unseen.” In retrospect, this was a poor choice of name.

After Tremor fell to pieces, I worked as a designer at Neversoft on a game called Tony Hawk Underground. THUG for short. It was only begrudgingly called that, though. If I ever have children and for some reason let them name themselves and they choose something like “Doomcock the Despoiler…” Well, I’m prepared for how embarrassing that feels. Heh.

Working at Neversoft really crushed my soul. I wanted to work on stuff that interested me, stuff that I cared about. If you’re going to crush your soul to a fine powder through overwork – and make no mistake, game development is unadulterated masochism – it’s better to work towards your own dream than to let the dreams of others be built on a foundation of your sweat and tears. So I jumped ship to Flashbang, where sweaty tears salt the sweet pretzels of victory.

Another thing I do is teach; I teach the game and level design classes at the Art Institute of Phoenix. If you have something interesting to teach, I highly recommend it. In fact, I wrote an article about why you should teach. Teaching is one of the most rewarding, fulfilling things you can do with your time. Now that I think about it, the whole reason I wrote the book was to try to extend the sense of joy and pleasure I get from helping someone make the game or level they want. There’s just nothing like it.

In the future, I’ll be posting here various design-related rantings. People think that designing video games is a bit of a lark and that it’s as easy as tying your shoelaces or eating. I hope that exposing a bit more of the process of design will help those of you who’ve never made a game understand better what goes into it, why it’s exceedingly difficult and humbling, and, on the up side, why it’s worth doing. In fact, making games might be the most rewarding thing ever. It is for me, at least. As my friend Kyle once said “Games are the new medium of choice for the motivated misfit.”

And that’s it from me for now. I’ll leave you with a challenge. A hobby of mine is collecting Swink pseudonyms. For example: A Swinkle in Time. Swinkletoes. Swunken Treasure. Can you come up with one I haven’t heard yet?

Two in the Swink, over and out.

Hello world!

I am the resident technical artist at Flashbang. “What does that mean?” you might be asking. An apt question. I do a little bit of everything. I primarily handle art production for our games: models, textures, rigging, animation, and so on. However, I also do my share of asset integration and programming support. Sometimes I might implement a new feature, sometimes I might finish someone else’s. I also try to keep things pretty anal about historical or scientific accuracy when the situation presents itself. Matt is also a real help in this respect.

How did I come into being? I may have been forged in a great furnace, or may have sprung from a spore in the ground (I’m not telling), but I ended up in the Phoenix area for school. I met Matthew and the original Flashbangers (may they rest in peace) plus Steve through the IGDA while I was working on my art degree. I worked for some other studios here in the valley as a technical artist on some sports and racing games, specializing in character technology, and eventually quit them to go back to school. Two degrees later, I decided to go back to work. My friends at Flashbang were working on small projects that interested me, and so I started work on Raptor Safari as a contractor while finishing my thesis.

I plan to use this space to argue with people about the technical accuracy of our games. Did I model the wrong number of neural spines on Jetpack Brontosaurus? Do you believe that Dromaeosaurids could pronate their wrists? Well I’m not responsible for making all of these decisions necessarily, but I will readily tell you who was at fault if a mistake has been made

Seriously though, I would like to be able to discuss with people why we make certain decisions in our games to balance performance and visuals. It can be pretty easy to look at a game and just say things like “why doesn’t it look like Crysis?” (hint: we wanted people to be able to play it without a computer from decades in the future) without really considering some of the issues we have to tackle. Sure, we have a small team and try to put out our games relatively quickly, but many times there are specific reasons why we do certain things. I hope that by doing this we can get a sense for what all of you really think is important in your gaming experience so that we know where to really focus our efforts.

We want creativity to guide things here, but we also want to hone our art, so feel free to help us out!

Heya folks, I’m Matt Mechtley, programmer and resident maths go-to guy here at Flashbang! I program a little bit of everything, but I usually tend to end up doing game systems (like Jetpack Brontosaurus’s mission system), user interfaces, character animation, and anything heavy on linear algebra. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of iPhone programming. More than anything, I enjoy technical challenges — I’ve written code to combine skinned meshes, dynamically create plants on terrain, and load and store user-made levels in Splume. I also made a custom breathalyzer peripheral that interfaced with a pong game!

I joined up with Flashbang a little over a year ago, just as Splume was getting started. I’d just finished my degree in Mathematics, and was finishing up a NASA Space Grant-funded project, making an interactive simulation of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. I’d decided to put off graduate school for a year or two, and the prospect of getting paid to work with my best friends on awesome games I loved was too good to pass up! (Ok so it was a toss-up between awesome games and trying to get a position with the USGS, but I really like maps and rocks)

My favorite part of working for Flashbang is the excellent way that we all play off one another’s ideas, turning things that are funny into things that are patently absurd. Case in point: the genesis of Off-Road Velociraptor Safari. The original idea behind the game was a “vehicle physics test with terrain.” I was having dinner one night with Adam, who told me, “Matt, I have an idea for this vehicle test that we want to do.” I responded, “Wait don’t tell me. You’re driving around an off-road jeep catching raptors with a giant snare?” He grinned and replied, “I was going to say ATV and a net-launcher, but yeah.” My brother and I may have dinosaurs on the brain. It pretty much snowballed once we told everyone else. What if it was a raptor driving the jeep? What if he were wearing a monocle and pith helmet? Then of course there is the infamous feathers issue, which I campaigned for after reading Turner et al.’s article in Science.

I’m excited that we now have a place to keep everyone abreast of our current projects — especially the iPhone ones, which I’m really digging. I’d love to answer anyone’s technical questions, and be a pedantic sod regarding the scientific accuracy of our games! For instance — the text in Minotaur China Shop should really be written in Linear A, the script of the ancient Minoan civilization. It makes little sense for the minotaur of ancient Crete to be writing in Latin characters, after all.

O Hail Eris!

Hi! I’m Ben, and like I mentioned in the Jetpack Brontosaurus post, I’m the Art Director here at Flashbang. It’s my job to make sure that anyone involved with art is on the same page when it’s time to crack down on a project. I try to use open communication to ensure that everyone feels like they’re contributing artistically while maintaining a cohesive aesthetic. It’s a tough job, but I love it. Especially since I’m an artist first and foremost, and due to the nature of the small studio environment I still spend a lot of time doing production work. This could mean anything from concept art, 3d modeling, texturing, animation, or level design, to any of the other specialized disciplines that go hand in hand with game art.

My relevant backstory! I became a part of the team at the end of 2007 when work on Off-Road Velociraptor Safari had just begun. At the time, there was no full-time artists so I took the reigns. Adam was working as a contractor at the time, and he had already made a jeep and some raptors, so I basically worked around what he had already done and that’s where it all begun. If you want some more technical details on the production of OVRS, check out the dev-log I made on my personal site. It’s technical! But the point is that this was the game I used to not only learn Unity, but to embed myself in the Flashbang family.

I’d like to use the Blurst.com blog space mainly to share insight into the dark, dank, and moist art harvesting that goes on here everyday at Flashbang. I’m of the open source mentality, so if there’s something I can share that I think will be useful to someone else, you’ll see it here from me. And if there’s anything I think Blurst users NEED to see that is related to games, art, or game art…I’ll throw that down, too.

The most important thing about what we do here is that our development process is flexible and organic. If you see something you like or don’t like, let me know! I’ve always been surprised with the amount of useful feedback I’ve gotten throughout my years of doing art, and even more surprised with what you can apply to future projects. In any case, It’s important to me that I have an open dialogue with the people that play our games, so share your thoughts! I might shuffle you over to a team member with a more appropriate response to your feedback, but I still want to hear it!

xoxo

Hello Internet!  We don’t talk enough.  It’s not that we aren’t listening.  In fact, we actually spend a disturbing amount of time reading–and crying over–your comments on our games.  YouTube is always amusing and incoherent, but some of the GameTrailers comments actually stung.  Really, guys?  An N64 game?  Cry.

One of our goals with Blurst is to open a dialog with you, our esteemed player.  The blog will be a bit part of that, especially until our forums go live.  So to kick it off, each of us on the Blurst team will be posting our introduction over the next week.  Tune in every day for a new post!  Our RSS feed is right here, which may make things easier.

Look for the first post tomorrow.  And please, tell us what you think!  We’re here to talk with you guys about our games, games in general, and how to learn basic-to-intermediate unicycling skills.  Let this be the beginning of a long and beautiful relationship!  I mean the good kind, not the average relationship.