Minotaur China Shop released!
Hooray!
http://blurst.com/minotaur-china-shop/play
Also, amusing profile interview on Rock Paper Shotgun:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/12/11/minotaur-china-shop-is-live-we-talk-to-flashbang/
1 CommentTo: Games 4 Touch
RE: Your unethical bullshit.
I don’t usually get riled up about things like this, but you’ve really crossed the line with this one. Petri Purho is too nice a guy to sue you. He should, and would be successful in doing so; you have copied the mechanics, level structure, look, feel, and sound design of Crayon Physics. He’s too nice a guy even to write you a strongly worded email.
So, here’s your message: get a life, you creative parasites. Get a life, and make your own games. What you have done is indefensible. If you’re going to clone someone else’s brilliant idea because you’ve none of your own, at least have the decency and respect to alter the treatment slightly. Just slightly and I could have looked at your game and said ‘ah well, it’s the casual space, what are you going to do?’ As it is, you’ve given Petri a slap in the face. It will not affect him or change his approach to game design - he is brilliant and courageous, unlike you - but what you have done is wrong, and someone needs to tell you so. In your heart of hearts, despite the money you are now making, you know you are uncreative lowlife scum. You have stolen from an independent game developer, the righteous little guy, the creative future of the medium. Congratulations.
Hoping you choose a better path in the future,
Steve Swink
Game Feel Cover Reviewed on fwis
Fwis was somewhere I poked around whilst looking for inspiration for the cover to zee book. I ended up conceding that I’m not much of a graphic designer but, hey, I’m happy with the end results. The comments on this blog were fascinating to me…it’s always neat to hear designers from another discipline talk shop. I feel like tracking down more knowledge RE graphic design. I mean, I know what kerning is. But, like, woah.
At any rate, go Phil! I’m surely pleased with the final result. And apparently it was interesting enough to show up on a fancy book cover review blog. I’m pretty sure that hasn’t ever happened to a Morgan Kaufmann book before 
.
We’ve been design-scooped, boys!
And by we I mean my brain cells, ha ha.
This reasonable gentleman, Ian Dallas, has created a game entitled “The Unfinished Swan.”
Untitled from shockwave on Vimeo.
Shawn linked it to me this morning and I was confused and amazed. The reason? This:
http://steveswink.com/Unity/whitewash1.html
I’ve been mulling this idea around for a few months. A couple weeks ago, I got to mocking it up, with Shawn’s help. How crazy is that? It’s just one of those weird, universe coincidences, though. My guess is that Ian and I would probably get along pretty well and have some awesome game design conversations.
At any rate, his looks much cooler and I can’t wait to play the finished version!
In the mean time, it’s back to the whiteboard for me…
It was the Blurst of days…
Rumblings on the horizon, cracks in the round pottery dome of reality…for Flashbang has grabbed the very reigns of the universe with the pre-pseudo announcement of BLURST!
*Ahem*
Yeah, so we’re putting up a new site for all our games. It will be cool, I think. In our collective minds it’s a pretty excellent realization of our dream to make amazing, weird games and post them to the Internets. And have people play them and like them. And then we somehow make money off the whole apparatus, which allows us to move away from doing contract work. Huzzah!
Book: Complete
Whew!
Available for preorder here.
It will be out mid October, apparently.
———————————————
And now back to lifeus interruptus.
Time to move into my new house, put out the fires on all the projects I was ignoring, and get some freaking sunshine and exercise.
And maybe get a husky puppy and name it Seamus.
Maybe.
More thoughts on writing and on how the book turned out at a later date. In the mean time, email me if you want to read the manuscript and maybe do a quote for Amazon or the book back. Or if you’re interested in using it in a class or something.
*passes out*
Big, Sexy Dinosaurs
Boy, are they beautiful!
Churning and Burning
Wow! Thanks to everyone who commented on the last post. I desperately hope I can live up to expectations and that the book is cool and awesome in the end.
I greatly appreciate the vote of confidence but the first manuscript submission was definitely not the end and I can’t afford to view it as such. I’m actually sweating a bit at the moment; The notion that stuff I’m sending off now is final, set in stone…it’s a yinyang of terror and elation. Elation because, well, the end is finally in sight. Terror because I was in such a ludicrous hurry to finish up each section that I managed to crank out some truly abysmal writing. As I’m discovering now that I ‘m churning through doing final edits and tying up loose ends, I’ve committed just about every conceivable Cardinal Sin of the First Time Author. If you find some day find that you’ve woken up, Memento-style, from a bout of crippling amnesia and have for some inexplicable reason agreed to write a book…condolences 
. I recommend the following, in no particular order:
1. Create diagrams as you go. They are always more time consuming than you think they’re going to be and if you come back to them later you often end up rewriting sections of text to match.
2. Write a detailed, comprehensive outline ahead of time. I thought I understood what an outline was, but I was painfully mistaken. An outline means you’ve traveled the thought paths of the book from beginning to end. If you can’t talk your way through the entire book via the outline, explaining each point in detail, the outline is not complete.
3. There’s no such thing as the perfect word, sentence, paragraph, chapter, section. I’ve wasted so much time trying to be clever with my writing it’s nearly beyond calculation. At this point, I’d say I’ve written at a ratio of two to one. That is, I’ve written two words of nonsense that I threw away to every one that stayed. That’s a lot of words :/. The lesson is that you should make your point first, make it clear and concise, and then make it fun to read. I’ve found that once I have clearly stated what I’m trying to say the writing part takes care of itself.
4. Permissions are a bitch. Secure them as quickly as possible. Cold calling does not work.
5. Write as if every draft were final. I really wish I’d done this. It would have taken just a little bit more time, but re-engaging with a piece of writing later is so much harder than pushing it that extra step when you’re really ‘in it.’
6. You’ll never have that day. This is a tip Ian Bogost imparted as we trudged through the cold Montreal evening: you will never have a day when you write for 18 hours straight and complete 10,000 amazing words. Better to write 500 words that stay in the final manuscript on the back of a movie ticket than to beat your head against a monitor for a whole day.
7. Avoid contingency webs. Keep a stable of other interesting things that help the book get closer to completion but which don’t require brilliant flashes of insight. I got really wrapped up in the idea that to start A I needed B complete and C complete and so on. This is probably the single biggest failure of my writing process. If you think this way, paralysis is waiting just around the corner. Writing, like game design, never feels “done.” The solution is to attack thought problems at the highest, most abstract level first. If I had to do it over, I wouldn’t have written a single coherent sentence until I could dance my way through the entire thoughtflow of the book, start to finish. That way, you can “finish” the whole thing at one level and simple refine and expand from there.
I’m actually writing this as a warm up; I’ve been a naughty boy and haven’t finshed what i wanted to get done today. After this, I’m off to complete an example chapter about Super Mario 64.
Huzzah!