2009 August

How does a donkey earning minimum wage find himself trapped in the very fabric of time itself, doomed to relive the same 30 seconds again and again?  We’ll be posting the Story of the Time Donkey, one image per day, to our Facebook account.

Head on over there–you should become a fan anyway–and check out the  story!  We’ll keep posting them up until launch day on Tuesday.  It’s a thrilling adventure!

This is what happens when you have amazing people help you with your amazing projects. One Mr. Cory Robinson, a local game artist, good personal friend of ours, and all-around-super-talented-guy helped us out with some illustration work. In order to make the Time Donkey menu scene come to life I needed some promotional nonsense (product photos, discount alerts, beverage list) to surround the functional menu elements (game logo, the “play game” button, the “change username” button) and Cory delivered. While it ended up completely appropriate in the context of the title scene you don’t see it very well when it’s all said and done so here it is in detail.

Keep in mind that when I tasked him with this my instructions were very vague; crappy fast food menu with ridiculous products on it. He reached into the swirling neon vortex of his brain and created all of these products and their names, going off of Flashbang’s “Num Nums Raptor Taco” inside joke from back in the day and nothing else. When we looked at it for the first time we all cried from the laughter, and also from Matthew hitting us with a car antenna. Enjoy!

The gentle Time Donkey surveys his native environment. Perhaps he is scouting for food, or looking for a mate. Or maybe he is trapped in time itself, inadvertently cycling through the same 30 seconds, doomed to a nightmare of clones and tacos.

Find out for yourself when Time Donkey launches here at Blurst.com on September 1st.  The countdown continues!

Our good friends over at local studio Coin App just launched the official website for their upcoming game, Max Blastronaut. They’re entering the game into the Dream-Build-Play competition. Good luck guys! This is definitely a game to watch.

As you may have noticed on our super-amazing new Blurst sidebar, we have created a Flickr account to track the history of Flashbang/Blurst.  To start things off we’ve uploaded 150+ photos from the company’s past:  conferences, game jams, parties, and random photos.  Here are some highlights:

GDC 2009

Steve and Matthew emcee the Independent Games Festival and Independent Games Summit. We organize our third-annual indie party.

Halloween Party 2007

After getting our new office space, we throw a video game-themed Halloween party. It is both nerdy and delightful, with a chance of drunk. One of our friends throws up all over our new carpet and sleeps with his head lodged awkwardly behind the toilet.

Embarrassingly Old Photos

We’ve posted random/old photos as far back as 2002. Some are particularly embarrassing for us, although we imagine many of these photos are probably embarrassing for humanity at large. You be the judge.

Office History

Flashbang operated out of conjoined apartments for several years (at one point we actually had four adjacent apartments in 2×2 grid, with holes drilled through floors/walls for network cable). Here’s what our “office” has looked like through the years:

More Photo Goodness

We’ll backfill more photos as we find them squirreled away in our digital shoeboxes. We need to take some new photos, too. We’ve had amazing Blurst-colored walls in our office for 8 months now, although I can’t actually find any photos to prove it. In the meantime enjoy browsing the photo archives! It’s probably easiest to browse by set.

Even we’re not sure what kind of horrifying photographic evidence exists in the Flashbang photo archive. Post your favorite photo in our updated comment system!

Back at the Unite Conference in 2008, Unity added the ability to publish for iPhone. After the conference, we stuck around and did a game jam with some friends. I made up a basic character and control scheme for an iPhone boxing game, which would later become Touch KO. Matt and I have been working on this as a side project of our own since about January. I chronicled the development pretty thoroughly on my own blog, so I won’t bother rehashing too many details here.

Anyhow, here we are many, many months later and Touch KO is now out in the App Store as an all new Blurst game! Apart from all the work Matt and I put into it, our good friend Mike Heald also did some awesome work on the game’s graphic design elements. It’s not quite as quirky as other Blurst games, but it does add some new Blurst achievements and a leaderboard. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch you should check it out! There is even a Blurst Ballroom level and a pair of Blurst trunks among tons of other shameless plugs for various friends of ours.

I’ve been with Blurst since before we called ourselves Blurst. I joined two years ago, after finishing my B.S. in Mathematics. At the time, Flashbang Studios was just Matthew and Steve, with Shawn as an intern, and were working out of Matthew’s apartment. I was looking for an interesting challenge, and the notion of making games that WE wanted to play in obscenely short production cycles was a pretty appealing challenge!

When I started, we were working on Splume, which was two weeks away from a contest deadline (The Top DOG contest at Unite 2007). I spent most of the project making the level editor and the survival mode. The short production cycle was all I’d hoped it would be, and we even won the grand prize, netting us a duffel full of cash!

Two years later, and I’ve programmed an eclectic mix of systems in our games — AI for Raptor Safari, Blush, and Crane Wars, the mission system in Jetpack Brontosaurus, Minotaur China Shop’s random layout generator, almost all of Rebolt, and the foundation for Time Donkey’s movement and camera, among others. I’ve also been the Math go-to fellow and, with my brother Adam, the resident science pedant. Raptor Safari’s controversial feathers were spawned after reading Turner et al.’s discovery of quill knobs on the forearms of Velociraptor mongoliensis, and it was a hard-fought compromise that led to an Apatosaurus with the given name “Brontosaurus” being the star of Jetpack Brontosaurus.

I’ve loved almost every minute of it, especially since I’ve worked among awesome friends. But the Universe is full of challenges, and there is another one that’s been nibbling at the corners of my mind even these two years. During the last year of my Bachelor’s, I worked for Rogier Windhorst, an astrophysics professor at Arizona State, creating an interactive simulation of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. This image — the deepest optical light image ever taken — represents 95% of the history of the Universe. Despite covering a tiny patch of sky only 1/10 of the full moon’s width, the HUDF contains over 10,000 visible galaxies, the oldest having emitted their light up to 13 billion years ago!

I was, of course, immediately enthralled. It’s one thing to wonder at the works of Nature that we can see on the Earth — the wispy vortices at the edge of a cloud, canyons carved by a river’s flow, a species of ape whose intelligence has allowed it to build artifice and culture. It’s another kind of wonder entirely to look at an image and see light, far too dim for the naked eye, emitted by a billion fusion reactors only 300 million years after the birth of our Universe. Given the opportunity to probe those depths, to explore that inexhaustible possibility space, I would be completely unable to resist!

Over our post-Crane Wars break, such an opportunity arose. A lunch with my old advisor led to an offer to admit me late as a PhD student for the Fall. I of course could not say no, doubly compounded by the fact that soon after I begin, we will be getting data from observations made with the Hubble Space Telescope’s recently-installed new instruments!

My experience working with Unity and Flashbang/Blurst has given me an invaluable tool for my future research — the ability to program and problem solve at even more ridiculous speeds than when I began. I also plan to continue using Unity, producing more small educational simulations or games, so I can hopefully inspire the next generation of scientists, the way that Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking have inspired me.

More than anything though, I value the myriad other brilliant indie game developers that I’ve met and befriended along the way, my coworkers included. Necessarily generalists who must wear a number of hats, the knowledge that can be synchronized and the recombinant ideas that can be bred in an hour of talking to an indie game dev can be worth weeks of toiling away in solitude. Though I am a scientist at heart and my future holds mostly the marvel of exploration, it has been my honor to have even a small part in creating something wonderful — both games that bring joy and laughter, and an indie games community that declares, in one voice, “We will not go quietly into the night! We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive! Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!”

I’ll miss you dudes, keep in touch. <3