Blurst (2)

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

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?

We printed a bunch of  shirts for next week’s Game Developer’s Conference.  If you can find us early enough in the week we may still have a Minotaur China Shop or Raptor Safari shirt left (reprints in new colors of last year’s design).  Not going to the GDC?  No problem!

Win a shirt on Twitter!  We’re going to give away a fine Off-Road Velociraptor Safari t-shirt, in beautiful olive and yellow, to one of our Twitter followers.  To enter all you need to do is follow Blurst and tweet:

I just entered to win an Off-Road Velociraptor Safari t-shirt!  Follow @Blurst and retweet to play: http://blur.st/raptor-shirt

These are high quality prints on American Apparel t-shirts.  We’re still wearing the original run from last year; they hold up well!  We’ll let the contest run over the weekend and then pick a winner on Monday.  Good luck!

Phill Cameron recently interviewed the company about our plans for six Blurst games in 2009, our history, and our view of the indie gaming world. The interview just went up over at GameSetWatch, a clever gaming site run by Simon Carless (Game Developer Magazine, Gamasutra, IGF):

With such quick development cycles for each of your games, are there a lot of ideas that don’t make it? Or are they all used eventually?

FS: There are tons of ideas that don’t make it. Our policy here is to spew out whatever coagulates in our brain soup. Naturally, most things are not going to make the cut. Part of this is because there isn’t enough time in the day or an idea is too complex, part of it is that some ideas aren’t any good, and part of it is that some ideas are just too genocidal, demeaning, horrible, abusive, disrespectful, and hideously irreverent to thrust upon the world.

For the curious, we handle interviews by dropping the questions into Google Docs and letting everyone pick at it, like so many lions gorging on downed zebra.  Sometimes an answer is a single person, but we tend to mingle at the sentence-to-sentence level.  See if you can guys can guess which line is by which person!

Read the entire interview over at GameSetWatch!

We’re running our usual Fridays with Flashbang webcam/chat feed today, with a twist: We’ll be releasing a Blush beta to the chat sometime this afternoon. Drop in and say hi!

Stream videos at Ustream

And a chat for the feed:

The Ustream.TV page is here, if you want to view it directly on the site.

We’ve been joking about running a live webcam/audio feed in the office for awhile (mostly as a means to squash the horribly offensive atmosphere). If the Internet’s good for anything, it’s good for taking a joke and going too far with it. I think we’ve proved that.

So here you go! Fridays with Flashbang! We’re going to run a webcam every Friday for your amusement. Fridays are actually our experimental days, so people will be working on all kinds of random stuff. Enjoy!

Stream videos at Ustream

And a chat for the feed:

The Ustream.TV page is here, if you want to view it directly on the site.

Thanks to help from you we’ve been able to isolate and squash a handful of bugs in Minotaur China Shop. Most of the bug fixes are specifically geared towards people with older/slower computers. We’ve already pushed these changes to the server and anyone who was getting the common black/blank screen or a screen full of gray smoke should be able to play just like everyone else.

The war effort needs your effort! At work, at home, in the community! Psychotic mother laugh!

We’ve come to realize that we will need to come up with some centralized bug tracking system, so we can quickly and effectively get feedback from you all and get bugs delegated to whomever is able to kill it dead. It takes a considerable amount of time to go searching for bug reports on other forums, blog comments, etc… When we get our forums online we hope to have a more direct communication with you all, but until then we’ve created a email for people to send their bug reports to. If you find something in one of our games that seems out of place send us an email at bugs@blurst.com/ and we’ll get back to ya.

Know Your Foe! <3 Neil Patrick Harris

Obviously the more information we can get from you the easier it is for us to track down bugs and kill them. Unfortunately, as an independent company we don’t have every single possible configuration of computer hardware out there. Our studio mostly consists of macs with pretty high end specs. We do have a couple PCs with lower hardware configurations, but there’s just no way we could find every hardware scenario possible, especially for windows machines. Because of this there are bound to be problems with a few computers out there with weird setups. If you’re having problems playing one of our games you may have such a computer.

So what’s the best way of giving us the information we need to diagnose a problem? First step is to give us as much information as you can about how to duplicate the problem. Does it happen immediately after you start playing the game? Does it happen after your Minotaur goes into rage? How about after you change a level in Jetpack Brontosaurus? Or even the second time you play a game of Raptor Safari? The second step is to give us as much information about your computer as you can. If you’re on windows and you know how to do a dxdiag report, that is the most complete way of getting your hardware configuration to us. If not, then just let us know what you know about your computer and we can work with that. The last step is to get us your unity player log. Steps for that can be found here.

Let me tell you something! I’m from Tempe… I mean Buenos Aires and I say Kill Them ALL!

As Ben expertly showcases in a previous video blog, we printed some excellent mugs for Minotaur China Shop promotion. We used Zazzle for this, and it’s quite easy to share our product designs so you guys can buy them. And so we have!

For now we only have the MCS mugs, but we’ll be adding t-shirts and other designs into the shop over time. We have two price points available, too:

- Cheap Edition (minimum Zazzle price)

- Blurst Supporter Edition (pay a little extra to help us out)

Or, if you’d like to give us monies, but don’t imbibe fluids of any kind, you can always donate directly:

Over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

He’s a prolific and rather brilliant writer, that Minotaur. Don’t you think?

Hey everybody!  Hope you’re playing and enjoying Minotaur China Shop. From the stats we’ve been seeing and the comments all over the internets, it seems you are.  Cheers, and thanks again for playing!  It really does make us so happy to see people playing and enjoying our games.

Just popping in to officially post these two sweet videos Ben made and posted to our Vimeo account. If you want to keep up with stuff like this, an easy way is to follow our Blurst Twitter Account. The first is of the “final hours” kind, taken just before launch (and featuring and appearance by Ubisoft’s business development department, natch.) The second is a preview of some of the sweet Minoschwag we created in a limited run for the launch of the game. Our marketing budget is about as much as a trip to the grocery store, but we still get to make some fun stuff like shirts and mugs. And china that’s meant to be smashed.

Keep your eyes on this space for information on upcoming competitions in which you may be able to win the video-featured schwagery.

Video Blog: 1 Hour to MCS Launch from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo.
The final hours of MCS!

Press Schwag for Minotaur China Shop from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo.
MCS shirts, mugs, and goodies. Huzzah!