As Ben mentioned earlier most of us have been out in Texas for GDC Austin. The primary focus of this conference is, unfortunately, MMOs and since we aren’t making Cretaceous Worlds or NumNums Online much of the content for this conference was superfluous. However, Matthew and Steve, along with Simon Carless (Gamasutra/IGF), Adam Saltsman(Semi Secret/Flixel), and Brandon Boyer (Offworld), hosted an amazing Independent Games Summit, the first to be hosted at GDC Austin.

The Independent Games Summit lasted for only two of the days we were in Austin. The rest of the time was spent with our Indie brethren from around the world. These people are amazing artists, designers, and developers and very good friends of ours. It’s always motivating and inspirational to spend time with the Indies and I hope we will funnel much of it into the future of Blurst.

We’re flying back to Arizona today, but that’s not the end of our adventures. Steve and Matthew are heading to Japan for the Tokyo Game Show on Tuesday! Don’t worry though, even with all of this excitement, we’ll have the next Blurst game out on time on November 1st. Keep an eye on the flickr stream for more photos from the trip! Photos of the trip are up on flickr, check ‘em out!

While we were away our Art Director, Ben, made an impressive game design prototype that we may or may not end up using for a Blurst game sometime in the future. Check it out!

We’re on track to launch 6 new games in 2009 at Blurst! Blush was launched successfully after an 8-week development cycle, so we changed gears into developing new concepts and prototypes. The first of these prototypes is Crane Wars. Adam and Matt present the concept to the rest of the company:

Watch Video in HD @ Vimeo

It’s a long video, but it covers the concept nicely (and you get to see how we discuss things, if you’re curious). But why watch a video? You can also:

Play Crane Wars Prototype

We’ll be posting regular video updates of our prototypes as we work towards the launch of our next game. Want to get instant notification of new videos and other inside info? Follow us on twitter.com/blurst!

Blush has come a long way from its humble beginnings at TIGJam to the game we drop on you later this week. It’s been pretty interesting wrapping something beautiful around an entirely monochromatic and overly simplistic prototype and I thought I’d share some snapshots of the process.

This was what it looked like at TIGJam when it was called Squiddy. It was very functional and the stark contrast put emphasis on the flowing motion of the tentacles, which was essentially the heart of the prototype.

When we began tossing the idea around of making an official Blurt game out of it my instinct was to push the black and white aspect of the look. This was my first mock.

After looking at for a while we all became concerned that if we were to continue in this direction it might overly resemble Flow. So when we inevitably decided to use color, I threw out a bunch of ideas to see what would resonate with everyone else.*

You can see in the lower right hand corner of the image what the general idea of each concept was. I personally expanded upon idea 2 as I saw bioluminscence as exciting territory. I wanted the team to be into the idea of a glowy, bloomy, see-through squid so I hit that first.

Once I placed it into an environment that was also glowy and bloomy I think everyone was feeling it.

The timing on these last few bits was perfect, as our initial part of the 8 week phase (pre-production) was wrapping up. I had developed a vision for the game by this part of the project that I wanted to communicate to the rest of the team. This image was created not only to showcase what I though would be a viable environment, but also to serve a production list. Hence the numbers and the corresponding key to the right of the image.

At some point during a game play mechanic discussion we were tossing around the idea of different abilities that affected your movement through space. In my eternal love of visual effects I made an image showing off different ways we could enhance the character.* One of these was actually implemented (but has changed since it’s initial incarnation), one is used heavily, and one was implemented but not actually used for anything. The rest were scrapped, but that’s okay! It was a useful source of visual inspiration.

At this point the game was called Blush and the aesthetic was falling into place. I created this image one day out of screenshots we were preparing for OffWorld not too long ago. This is NOT the logo or the menu for the actual game, it was just an image I made so I could personally experiment with text and colors.

This is about as much as I can show you before I’m basically showing off screenshots…WHICH I’LL DO LATER THIS WEEK! For your own information, this game has come quite a long way since even that image…

More information in the following days!

*For all you professional artists out there…one of the best things you can is formally sharing what you do best…CREATING! Spill your brain into a form others can perceive! Your ideas aren’t useful while they’re floating around inside your skull. When you put a bunch of ideas in front of the people you work with (even if you feel they aren’t neccessarily good) you are expanding the creative potential of whatever you’re working on by providing tangible options for your team members. Besides, when you let others pick and choose from elements you’ve created, you’re still the artist yet other feel as if they have had some say! So spill it, chumps. All of it. For better or for worse.