2009 January

Oh man oh man oh man this is totally sweet!

Tricericopter!

Triceracopter!

The fine chaps over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun sent over a few questions about Blush, which we merrily answered. The interview is credited to “The Flashbang Hivemind”, which basically means we dump the questions into a Google Doc and let everyone hack at it.

We talk a bit about the goals of Blush, as well as our plans for 2009:

Flashbang was a bit of an iceberg in 2008. We had a few prominent game releases that caught everyone’s attention, but there was also a huge amount of production going on behind the scenes (to horde some of this “money” we keep hearing about). We actually launched 12 projects total, in 2008, and much of the proceeds dropping right into our cash pile. The intern occasionally rakes it back up all nice and pretty. Almost half of these projects were things like training games for corporate clients; the kind of stuff they don’t warn you about in school. But we’re coasting now, and rejecting all contract work, so we figure we should be able to pull off six games with all of the company above the water line. The trick is that most of these projects happened in parallel to our Blurst stuff, so we need to figure out how to avoid the “you can’t make a baby in 1 month with 9 women” problem. Our solution? Post-birth assembly.

Read the full interview over at RPS!

Danny B of dB Soundworks stopped by the office today to touch bases on music for Blush. Yesterday he created a great set of sample songs to draw ideas from, and today we decided which to use as the basis for the game itself. Things are sounding hot! Have a listen:

Track #1:

Track #2:

Track #3:

Track #4:

Track #5:

We like the first song, for the normal ambient background music, and fifth song as a title/theme track. What are your favorites?

We’ve been at hard at work in the new year, prototyping game ideas and deciding what our next game for Blurst is going to be.  This week marked our changeover from prototyping to production on a new concept:

Blush

More details will be posted here; bookmark the blog or follow us on Twitter.  We’re aiming for simple gameplay:  destroy enemies and collect their powers to increase your own.  This first test footage includes some visual ideas and gives you an idea of the tentacle physics:

Blush (First Test Footage) from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo.

Blush will be released here at Blurst.com on March 1st, 2009.

Our iPhone robot combat game, !Rebolt! has finally made it through approval purgatory and is now available in the App Store for $0.99!

Go buy it! (iTunes)

Adam and I began work on the prototype as a weekend-long project for TIGJam 08, but it quickly turned into our most ambitious iPhone project to date! After ten weeks of hard work, we’re happy to finally have it out for folks to play! We hope you enjoy it as much as we do! Maximize your score, collect data to learn humanity’s ultimate fate, and maybe you’ll even find one of the Bonus Missions!

In case you missed the final trailer, here it is again!

!Rebolt! Trailer (iPhone) from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo.