Matthew Wegner has lead Flashbang’s development for the past 7 years. He also co-chairs the Independent Games Festival, advises the Independent Games Summit, hosts TIGRadio, edits Fun-Motion, and enjoys such things as unicycling 300 miles through Africa. Matthew was kind enough to answer some questions from IGM’s Nate Edwards about Raptor Safari’s Cancellation, Blurst’s Future, and Indie Game Development.

Unfortunately, the latest news for Flashbang is the suspended development of Raptor Safari 64, the HD update to what is probably your most popular Blurst title so far. What are your plans for the Raptor Safari project in the future?

We expect the “proper” HD/64 version to stay on ice for some time. At some point we may return to it, but in the near future–2010, at minimum–we don’t plan to spend any more time on it. Other versions or platforms are tempting. An iPhone version would be fun, if we can find some way to boil the core experience down to simpler controls and bare-bones graphics. Of course, iPhone/Android devices are getting more powerful all the time. It’s probably only a few years until the current content will port over in a single click.

So what are the new plans for Flashbang Studios and Blurst? Any 8 week-style games coming up?

We did a call for submissions on Blurst awhile ago, which has turned up some really cool developers and projects. There aren’t very many outlets for Unity-made projects on the web today (although I’m sure this will change soon). We’d like to spend the time required to set up Blurst to accomodate 3rd-party projects. It would be rad to see more games go live on the site.

At the moment everyone from Flashbang is kind of doing their own thing. At our peak we were 6 people full-time. Since then, the Mechtley brothers have gone on to pursue PhDs, Steve Swink formed Enemy Airship to pursue Shadow Physics development full-time, and Shawn White was recently hired by Unity Technologies to work on Unity full-time in Copenhagen. The office is still around, but it’s morphed into a bit of a shared workspace. On any given day you might find three different projects with three different teams being worked on.

That said, we may do some Flashbang limited-schedule games later this year. A fixed schedule makes a lot of sense, since it forces you to quickly answer some questions about what the core of your game is and what’s really fun about it. We’ll mix up the schedules, though. It’s easy to see how 8 weeks can hurt a project that could use more time, but it also cuts the other direction; we never would have made a Canabalt-scoped game, for instance.

Flashbang is probably the most prominent developer working entirely on the Unity development platform. What makes Unity your preferred tool for game development?

Thanks! We doubt we’ll retain our “most prominent” status very long–there are a lot of teams adopting Unity! There are a lot of reasons why we like Unity. They’ve solved a lot of hard problems in ways that make them simpler. Primarily, the workflow supports amazing iteration speeds. The Unity editor has one of those setups where the game itself plays in the IDE–at any moment you can pause, inspect your objects, move things around, re-balance numbers, and then simply hit resume. We always forget how much we’ve taken for granted with Unity until we do some contract work on another platform.

You are setting up a program to host other top-notch Unity games on Blurst from other developers. How have submissions for that been going thus far, and what stage are you at in this process?

Ah ha! Seems we jumped the gun on answering this. It went pretty well! The call for submissions had the same kind of percents you see across the Internet–we’ve had maybe 20 submissions, of which 75% were too simple/hobbyist/poor quality to really put on the site. The other 25% are super interesting, though, and we’d like to find some way to support them. There are two big issues we need to answer internally:

- How much effort do we want to put into preserving the Blurst “brand”? Should we push for a level of quality in games we host, and a certain quirkiness, or just let anything on the site?

- Technically, we’ve made a lot of decisions on the assumption that all of the games would be ours. Adding a new game to Blurst meant a lot of manually-inserted rows in databases and IDs to be set. We need to simplify and expose our API for Blurst profiles, save game information, achievements, and leaderboards.

How would you define “independent” video game development? I can remember some groaning when Q-Games of the Pixeljunk series was nominated for several awards at last year’s IGF, so the definition can cause conflict at times. Why do you think that is?

This question is contentious, for a lot of strange reasons. Personally, we think the important metric is the quality of your output, not the manner and means in which you created it. Independence as an identity is dangerous garb to don.

What’s Everybody’s Favorite Blurst game so far?

What’s great about Blurst is that we all like different games, for different reasons (some of them production-related, like this or that feature was really fun to work on, and some for player experience reasons, like this or that game is really fun to play). The Mechtley brothers really liked our iPhone game Rebolt, because they got to design every detail, Matthew likes Minotaur China Shop for the clumsy physics-ness of it, Shawn likes anything with amazing shader work, and the nightmarish laughter in I Hate Clowns haunts Ben’s every sleep.

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