Paper Moon

Paper Moon is live!  Our second Blurst game for 2009 is now available, right on schedule.  Click the image to play (and make sure you check out the leaderboards, too)!

Congrats to everyone that worked on the game!  The team did an amazing job.  This was our first collaboration, and Alec Holowka of Infinite Ammo did a fantastic job across the board (especially the amazing music)!

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

Paper Moon will be launching in less than 24 hours! Here’s the launch trailer. Alec did an absolutely fantastic job with the music, as you can tell:

For the best viewing experience watch it directly on Vimeo.

Hi! I wanted to talk a little bit about the art of Paper Moon as we wrap it up, and to give you all a little insight into its interesting collaborative history. First and foremost, Paper Moon started out as a stereoscopic game to be submitted into the Gamma 3d event from 2008. So before we had even gotten our filthy hands on it, it was already filled to the brim with wonderful artwork created by Infinite Ammo cats along with Adam Saltsman (also a friend of ours, and a legendary pleasure to work with). Here’s some of the amazing art he did for the initial iteration of the game:

Our plan for Paper Moon was simply to supplement what was already there. Create some more assets, expand the levels, and make it compatible with the Blurst leaderboards and achievement system. The end product ended up being very much the original product it was with the addition of a new level and some new twists and turns.

What excited me the most about getting to work on Paper Moon was that in order to create more assets, I would simply be creating the kind of traditional ink-heavy art I already make all the time. It would be hard to make it appear as if 3 different artists worked on this game, and as far as we’re concerned, that’s a good thing. What I specifically ended up doing (in addition to creating more environmental art) was making cool particle effects, populating the world with more hotness, and performing some rudimentary design work like moving things around and massaging item placement. It ended up being a TON of fun, and I feel like I added onto something that was already beautiful in the first place. Here’s a photo I took of some of the new art I made.

Both Adam and I took sharpies, drew on copy paper, scanned into Photoshop, and touched up from there. Hope you enjoy!

We spilled the beans in this Wall Street Journal article:  Blurst’s next game is a collaboration with Alec Holowka (of Aquaria / Bit-Blot / Infinite Ammo fame):  Paper Moon!

Paper Moon was originally created for the GAMMA 3D show.  Alec’s team created the GAMMA version, with additional artwork from the awesome Adam Saltsman.  We’ve been hard at work on an updated version here at Blurst, with a good portion of the company working on adding new levels, puzzles, sounds, and Blurst leaderboard/achievement integration.  Alec himself flew down from Canada to help wrap the build we’ll be pushing live this Friday.

Alec has posted some more details about the new features over at the Infinite Ammo blog.

We’re pretty excited about Paper Moon’s launch!  The game will go live this Friday, May 1st, as our next Blurst game with complete achievement/leaderboard integration.