Matthew (2)

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!

The attentive among you may be wondering, “Wait a minute–the next game wasn’t due until July 1st.  Why was Crane Wars released on the 15th, two weeks early?”

A good question!  While we certainly could’ve used the next two weeks to polish up Crane Wars, it also would’ve burned us out.  And we have three more games to make this year!  We decided to take a company-wide, two-and-a-half week break to split up the year.  This lets everyone unwind and recharge a bit before we hurl headlong into another series of 8-week game productions.  Making a game in eight weeks is a taxing process!  We love you, Internet, but we need some “me” time every now and then.

So what is everyone up to during the break?

• Matthew is unicycling from Kenya to Tanzania
• Adam and Matt Mechtley are finishing up their sweet iPhone boxing game.
• Steve is working on sweet shadow physics
• Ben is relaxing and working on sweet artworks
• Shawn is relaxing and working on sweet shader technology

If you really want to stalk us all over the break here’s our list of Twitter accounts. See you guys in a few weeks! We’ve got a lot of awesome stuff planned for Blurst over the next few months; the second half of 2009 is going to even better than the first…

Crane Wars is live! Go play it! Or enjoy this delightful free image (the image isn’t nearly as fun as the game, which is also free):

Crane Wars is our 8th web game, following (in order of development): I Hate Clowns, Splume, Raptor Safari, Jetpack Brontosaurus, Minotaur China Shop, Blush, and Paper Moon. Whew. That’s a lot of games! And we’re only halfway through 2009–expect another 3 games from us before the end of the year. The next game release is scheduled for September 1st, 2009: Time Donkey. I italicized it so you know it’s important.

After you play Crane Wars, be sure to check out the blog for videos and prototypes following its development. You can even play an early prototype!

Thanks to everyone on the team for their hard work, and particularly the Mechtley brothers for the early work on the concept and Alec Holowka for the fantastic music.

We’ll be hanging out watching the stats roll the rest of today. Let us know what you think, and we’ll see you guys on the leaderboards…

Thanks to the smarmy “this is just an X rip-off” meme in the indie world, I have been informed that Crane Wars is merely a Krane Simulator rip-off. And, by gods, I wish it were! Kran Simulator 2009 absolutely NAILS the pacing. Kran Simulator 2008? Move aside:

I would absolutely love to make a game with such devious pacing, because I know The Internet would still play it competitively. They would have to; that’s what they does.

The next Blurst game will be Crane Wars, a construction site battle between the Union and the Scabs.  We posted an early development video awhile ago, back when it was a prototype curated by Adam and Matt Mechtley.  Today the entire company is involved in its production as we move it from a prototype to a finished product.  It’s been keeping us busy–we’re getting it done sooner than you might think–so we haven’t had a ton of time to post much information to the blog.

Realizing this, we pulled out our trusty video-device and walked around to everyone’s desk so you can see what we’re working on.  Enjoy! For best viewing experience watch this in HD directly on Vimeo.

Paper Moon is live!  Our second Blurst game for 2009 is now available, right on schedule.  Click the image to play (and make sure you check out the leaderboards, too)!

Congrats to everyone that worked on the game!  The team did an amazing job.  This was our first collaboration, and Alec Holowka of Infinite Ammo did a fantastic job across the board (especially the amazing music)!

We’re launching Paper Moon today!  And, lo, it’s Fridays with Flashbang!  We run a live webcam–with audio–in the offices every Friday.  Spy on us as we wrap up the final tweaks and changes to get Paper Moon into your loving hands.

USTREAM Fridays with Flashbang Page

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.