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