2009 April

Paper Moon will be launching in less than 24 hours! Here’s the launch trailer. Alec did an absolutely fantastic job with the music, as you can tell:

For the best viewing experience watch it directly on Vimeo.

Hi! I wanted to talk a little bit about the art of Paper Moon as we wrap it up, and to give you all a little insight into its interesting collaborative history. First and foremost, Paper Moon started out as a stereoscopic game to be submitted into the Gamma 3d event from 2008. So before we had even gotten our filthy hands on it, it was already filled to the brim with wonderful artwork created by Infinite Ammo cats along with Adam Saltsman (also a friend of ours, and a legendary pleasure to work with). Here’s some of the amazing art he did for the initial iteration of the game:

Our plan for Paper Moon was simply to supplement what was already there. Create some more assets, expand the levels, and make it compatible with the Blurst leaderboards and achievement system. The end product ended up being very much the original product it was with the addition of a new level and some new twists and turns.

What excited me the most about getting to work on Paper Moon was that in order to create more assets, I would simply be creating the kind of traditional ink-heavy art I already make all the time. It would be hard to make it appear as if 3 different artists worked on this game, and as far as we’re concerned, that’s a good thing. What I specifically ended up doing (in addition to creating more environmental art) was making cool particle effects, populating the world with more hotness, and performing some rudimentary design work like moving things around and massaging item placement. It ended up being a TON of fun, and I feel like I added onto something that was already beautiful in the first place. Here’s a photo I took of some of the new art I made.

Both Adam and I took sharpies, drew on copy paper, scanned into Photoshop, and touched up from there. Hope you enjoy!

We spilled the beans in this Wall Street Journal article:  Blurst’s next game is a collaboration with Alec Holowka (of Aquaria / Bit-Blot / Infinite Ammo fame):  Paper Moon!

Paper Moon was originally created for the GAMMA 3D show.  Alec’s team created the GAMMA version, with additional artwork from the awesome Adam Saltsman.  We’ve been hard at work on an updated version here at Blurst, with a good portion of the company working on adding new levels, puzzles, sounds, and Blurst leaderboard/achievement integration.  Alec himself flew down from Canada to help wrap the build we’ll be pushing live this Friday.

Alec has posted some more details about the new features over at the Infinite Ammo blog.

We’re pretty excited about Paper Moon’s launch!  The game will go live this Friday, May 1st, as our next Blurst game with complete achievement/leaderboard integration.

Leaderboards have been available in-game for awhile, but haven’t made an appearance on the Blurst.com site. Until now! Leaderboards have launched for Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, Blush, and Minotaur China Shop. The other games use different scoring internals; we’ll either bring them in line with the new system or do some display for the older tables.

Take a look at Raptor Safari’s leaderboard page. You’ll see two columns of data. The left column shows the global ranking:

The right column shows your personal rank in each of these leaderboards:

Coming soon:

- Profile viewer (view someone else’s profile)
- Game viewer (view a particular game to see how scoring broke down)
- Friend list/leaderboard
- Geographic leaderboard

What else would you guys like to see?

Flashbang was ALL OVER the Game Developer’s Conference this year.  Because Matthew and I are Independent Games Festival coordinators, we get to see a side of the conference that most folks don’t. Specifically, we hang out backstage at the BIG stage, which is also where beers go to die.  Every year, we collect pictures of us hanging out with personal heroes as they come off the big stage at the Developer’s Choice and IGF awards. Check out this year’s sagging netful of decliousness:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/steveswink/

Oh, is that Ben with Shadow of the Colossus creator Fumito Ueda?  Oh, I suppose it is. Yeah, Ben’s a pretty big deal.  Cliffton B. Lisinksi was like “HOLY SHIT IS THAT BEN MINOFUCKING RUIZ?!” and insisted on a photo. True story.

A special treat: we met childhood hero/turns-out-to-be-a-super-nice-down-to-earth-dude Tim Schafer. Who has apparently not only heard of, but played and liked Raptor Safari.

*swoon*

*faint*

*wakes up hours later in an icy bathtub*