Post-Unite Blurst Status Update

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!