Meet the Team: Matthew Wegner

Hey there! I briefly introduced myself in the soft launch post, but here’s a bit more detail: I’m Matthew Wegner. I was one of the original four founders of Flashbang Studios, five and a half years ago, and the only remaining founder at the company today. My official title at Flashbang is CEO, although truth be told we have a fairly flat structure for day-to-day activity. Being CEO means I think a lot about the high-level focus of the company, with questions like: How much time should we spend on contract work? How much attention do we give the iPhone? How much cash do we have on hand? Can we hire someone else? Should we hire someone else? How much time should we put into each Blurst game?

There are nitty-gritty details, as well, like handling business development and correspondence, payroll, paying bills, and setting up travel for conferences. Most of this kind of stuff isn’t terribly exciting, but it has to be done. If you guys have any questions about what it takes to start up the business side of business, though, feel free to hit me up. My email is matthew at blurst.com (everyone else’s email follows the same pattern, btw–just firstname@blurst).

It’s telling that I’m starting out my third paragraph with nary of mention of actual game development. In fact, I’m constantly frustrated that I’m not able to do more on our games with more of my time. This isn’t necessarily bad, since it’s one reason I’m so driven, but I do end most of my days wishing I could have accomplished more. I generally have a backlog of tasks, and sometimes it’s hard to ignore what other people are working on–especially when they’re working on cool stuff–because my own list of tasks is getting too long.

I have a fascination with physics games, and spend a lot of my time working on the physics setup and balancing in our games. I did the core physics behavior in Splume, as well as the jeep/chain physics in Off-Road Velociraptor Safari. I wasn’t quite as involved with Jetpack Brontosaurus, partly because I was off unicycling across Vietnam for a whole month, but expect more physics-y goodness from me in the future. I’m the guy behind Fun-Motion, a site focused on physics games (with 80 reviews and counting, albeit counting more slowly these days).

From a technical standpoint, I act as our lead programmer and oversee our programming work, our Unity workflow and best practices, as well as all of our web/database integration. Unity is a pretty amazing piece of technology. I’m always open to discussing its merits, for anyone who’d like to know. Just email me!

Finally, I’m also fairly active in the larger independent game development scene. I recently planned TIGJam, a game jam for the TIGSource community. I also act as a content director for the Independent Games Festival, which means I do a lot of planning and logistics behind the judging process, and I’m an advisor to the Independent Games Summit, a 2-day event for indie games held during the Game Developer’s Conference.