Blush

Our first Blurst game of 2009 is up: Blush! We started prototyping games January 6th and began full production on January 20th. Many of our previous games have had short production cycles, but Blush is our first Unity game to hit a "true" 8-week cycle for both production and calendar time (earlier Blurst work has been spread out to accommodate contract jobs and the like).

Play Blush

Trailer

 

Really cool

The visual style is great, I think this may be my favourite of all your games yet as far as the look goes!

Well done

 

Awesome visuals... haven't had a chance to play yet, but will later this week!

 

That's a thing of beauty. Thanks for making it happen.

 

That's pretty amazing.

--Eric

 

Love it! Your rendering of the deep sea critters is wonderful. Well done!

 

Reminds me of Spore's early stage - but more stylish!

 

This game is amazing!

 

Very nice game! Great Zen experience just floating around in the sea. Extremely cool visuals.

 

Awesome awesome awesome. I've been waiting for this game, even without knowing a darn about it, and it was worth it.

Also, Sea Dragon Slayer, awesome. n_n

 

So cool!
*bows before Matthew*

That really is a piece of art. And you even included achievements ^^

 

Awesome!

 

Just curious, are you guys working on adding functionality to the Blurst site at all? I'd love to have some basic leaderboards/achievement viewing.

 

Beautiful graphics good job guys. I have not played it yet but viewed the video it looks fun and almost relaxing at times.

 

Yes, Blurst itself will be getting some much-needed development time over the next few months.

 

Awesome, you guys rock.

 

Wow, that is beautiful...my favorite flashbang game so far. But every new one is my new favorite

 

+1 for unlimited time, or at least; complete the level (kill everything) as fast as possible. So there wouldn't be any need for spawning enemies, and I could take my time and enjoy the BEAUTIFUL game and really nice music. BTW, you guys always pick some really nice soundtracks, thanks

Great game, but 4 minutes isn't enough, and it seems the pace of the game isn't to hurry (or I don't feel like it).

 

The game mechanic is great. really quickly I figured out it's about flipping your character around.

Great job.

 

That is super cool, good work as always guys!

/P

 

I've been playing Blush for a while now. I really enjoy the game and the soundtrack. I believe I'm currently #2 on the Rankings http://is.gd/lJOm

A couple things I noticed that I feel I should mention:

-Enemies seem to have non-random spawn points. It's not really a problem but something I've observed. There's a certain area in the game that I usually visit near the beginning of the game and I always see an octopus spawn at a specific location.

-Sea dragons, being so huge, sometimes get stuck in the islands. I always like killing them by dragging them into the egg collection places but when they're stuck (mostly their tails) they just wiggle there, unable to get at me. I think they get stuck when they spawn as opposed to getting stuck while moving/swimming.

Flashbang's games are always so good, so innovative. Keep up the great work guys.

 

Coooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool !!!!

 

Absolutely MIND BLOWING.

Beautiful.

 

I'm a bit late to the party but as I've told you (Matt W.) over IM, Shawn over the IRC channel and anyone else that will listen: nice work and gorgeous game!

 

Thumbs up on this one.

Edit: Are all these comments making you "Blush" yet? Punpunpunpun!!!

 

weirdiest and coolest game i messed about with in a long time hope it does well your innovation deserves success

 

Interesting!

Some points in the early part of the discussion mirror what I have experienced in several game productions I have been part of that also had set a goal of having an original/novel game concept/mechanic.

- In retrospect it often feels like too much time was spend on *discussing* the game concept and mechanic rather than get on with it and *finding* it through experimentation and prototyping. However, even after learning this lesson, it seems to be difficult to avoid repeating it for some reason.

- In the early stages of development, some or many team members often seem to have a feeling that they don't have a clear idea of what the game will actually be like, and that this lack of direction is making them less effective in their work. In retrospect desires are voices to try another time to transmit and share ideas at an earlier stage.

I'm not quite sure, but it almost seem like these two issues work against each other. The only thing they have in common is a desire to get the game concept/mechanic worked out as soon as possible, but the way to achieve it is ambiguous:

"We must begin making the game before we can really know what it will be like."
vs.
"We must know what the game is like before we can really begin making it."

I begin to think that no matter of wisdom can really avoid some of the frustrations inherit in these problems, and that it is just a natural part of a process as creative as this.

Rune

 

Dude, nice game!

Agreed about unlimited time mode though, your game looks great, so show it off for longer!

 

Definitely! I'm not sure it will be possible to escape some frustration. I think some of it is the bias of hindsight, too.

Blush feels so clear to us now--how the game plays, what the goals are, how to make it more interesting for a player--and it's easy to ask ourselves, "why couldn't we have got here faster??". We didn't talk about it too much in the postmortem, but there were a ton of alternate paths that were tried and discarded. Some had a day or two of work invested, and became actual prototypes, but many others were 5- and 15-minute thought experiments that fizzled out before any code was even typed. I think these mental brush fires, quickly extinguished, are responsible for the initial slow progress.

With our next prototypes I'm putting some company-wide attention in recording what wasn't done/kept, because I'm curious if we'll be able to record this "creative dark matter" that seems to fall off any sort of productivity tracking. The question isn't really how hard we were trying, but what we were trying.

 

Great game. Reminded me of trying to swing the ball and chain in Raptor Safari, but it felt even easier more intuitive to whip my tentacles around in this game.

 

@ Matthew: Many (all) of my older projects I never finished were this "creative dark matter" of which you are talking about They were stopped before any coding was done... after 1-2 months I always tryed to create a good game without any scripting, simply by building giant (and boring) worlds and putting some of the stuff from the tutorials in it...
Now I'm doing exactly the contrary: I first code and then build the worlds

:arrow: Forgot to say that Blush is an awesome game!

 

Love the game, and as said by Proton it reminded me of Velociraptor Safari but found it easier and more immediately satisfying to tail-hook the eggs in Blush than getting those pesky raptors on the ball. In a way it feels a bit like Velociraptor Safari meets Flow, which is not a bad combo

Nice postmortem, very useful. Thanks for sharing.

 

Not the first time this has been said
http://tigsource.com/articles/2009/03/03/blush-released-rejoice

 

Wow.

Amazingly well done. Amazing visuals, and awesome casual style.


Another amazing example of how Unity is going to rule the casual games market... And the web games market.

 

Great, beautiful and polished game, with addictive gameplay. It's even more impressive when you consider the time it took to develop it from A to Z: 2 months.

 

Unity ought to give you guys a percentage of the money I spent on their software.

It was you guys who inspired me to pick it up and try and it is you guys who's ideas I am most likely to steal .

I love this one but RaptorSafari will always hold the top stop in my heart I think.

 

Just saw the interview at Gamasutra. Way to promote Unity! http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22679

 

Great interview there!

 

Yeah, congrats guys on the nice game as always.

I have a follow up question to your interview: could you explain this unprotected idea sex? Maybe some diagrams?

,
-Jon

 

Cool game guys!

Great work as always!

 

This was fantastic.... I have a little 4 year old daughter at home that like to play, but sadly there are not that many good games out there.. This was just fantastic! I have permanently no internet at home, -so is it possible to save the game down for using it in offline mode? That would make her day, or year. This is Art.....

Mordred

 

Wow, lovely game! I look forward to trying it out on my faster computer at home when I have more time!