Blush

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?

I’ve had a bunch of people both on and offline ask for wallpapers so here you go! There’s two different images, a screenshot and a logo, and I made them in a handful of sizes.

Click to the link underneath the images to view in the browser. You can save it to your computer from there or you can right click the link and save it from there. Enjoy!

I did this partially for my own entertainment, but mostly for those of you who want to scrutinize cartographical reference when exploring new and uncharted areas so you can exploit their vast riches. Oh, and also because there have been some arguments on whether or not the game world is big or not. Now you can immaculately measure it for yourself in the unit type of your choice!

Do with this what you will, but remember who loves you. And if you’re going to construct elaborate Blush fan fiction and use this image in the introduction to the limited edition hard cover version you inevitably make, please let us know.

It’s been spoken of here and there in darker corners, but I thought I would give it a formal mention. You can head over to Danny B’s website to download the beautiful pieces of music he wrote for Blush. For FREE, even! It’s like there is some sort of inherent benefit in giving away your creations to people who will appreciate them!

;)

Blush is live!

Head over here to play Blush, our latest 8-week game creation.

For those of you who haven’t been following us on Twitter, or in the increasingly active UStream chat, Blush is a free game about the underwater exploits of a physics based squid (or Crystalline Attack Sperm, depending on who you talk to.) As you collect eggs and return them to the various glowing catchers, your tentacles grow longer and your speed increases. By the end of the game, you’re brawling against some rather sizable critters. We’ll let you discover just how large and how many for yourselves!

So that’s one 8-week game done, five to go. Whew! Thanks for believing in us, Internet!

<3

Flashbang

The official Blush trailer is upon us!

Blush Trailer from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo.

Also, we’re going to release the game sometime today.  It’s currently slow-simmering in a final basting of Flashbang Special Sauce™.  Hang around in the usual Fridays With Flashbang UStream chat if you want to play the game before anyone else!

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 hard at work finishing up Blush.  The game is coming together well; it looks beautiful!  To give you an idea of what we’re up to in the final week of a project like this, Ben took a camera around the office yesterday and asked everyone what they were working on:

Blush Final Days Office Tour from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo.

Ben also did a fantastic walkthrough of the Blush scene as viewed in Unity:

Blush Scene Anatomy from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo.

Both of these videos are HD, and viewed best directly on Vimeo in 720p. The best way to keep on top of new videos, and Blurst news in general, is to follow us on Twitter.

Finally, one last piece of news–our 2009 schedule calls for a game launch every 8 weeks, which we’ve scheduled for the 1st of every other month. In order to keep our sanity, and have a bit of a weekend, we’ve decided to launch games on weekdays. Blush will be launching here on Blurst.com on Monday, March 2nd.

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.

The fine chaps over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun sent over a few questions about Blush, which we merrily answered. The interview is credited to “The Flashbang Hivemind”, which basically means we dump the questions into a Google Doc and let everyone hack at it.

We talk a bit about the goals of Blush, as well as our plans for 2009:

Flashbang was a bit of an iceberg in 2008. We had a few prominent game releases that caught everyone’s attention, but there was also a huge amount of production going on behind the scenes (to horde some of this “money” we keep hearing about). We actually launched 12 projects total, in 2008, and much of the proceeds dropping right into our cash pile. The intern occasionally rakes it back up all nice and pretty. Almost half of these projects were things like training games for corporate clients; the kind of stuff they don’t warn you about in school. But we’re coasting now, and rejecting all contract work, so we figure we should be able to pull off six games with all of the company above the water line. The trick is that most of these projects happened in parallel to our Blurst stuff, so we need to figure out how to avoid the “you can’t make a baby in 1 month with 9 women” problem. Our solution? Post-birth assembly.

Read the full interview over at RPS!