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Flashbang Guys Getting It Right

Flashbang Studios, creators of the portal Blurst, which is filled with their own games such as Off Road Velociraptor, Blush, and Minotaur in a China Shop are really doing things right. They have now self funded five titles and try to come out with a new game every eight weeks (six per year total). All of their games use the Unity web plug in for a nice, high fidelity game experience in the browser on both Macs and Windows machines.

Flashbang's Blurst Game Portal
Flashbang's Blurst Game Portal


These guys have no idea that I am posting about them. While I met Mathew Wegner a few years back at a Casual Connect, we have not stayed in touch. At the time, I was extremely impressed with his creativity and the types of games they were creating. Since then, their company has really hit its stride. In this article, Gamasutra – News – Interview: Flashbang Studios, Blursting Through?, Gamasutra interviewed the founders.

Here are some of the things that I think they are doing right:

  • They have a”day jobs” doing contract work.
  • They are creating new Intellectual Property at the rate of six games per year.
  • They abandoned their old plan of making casual games to make money to concentrate on games they really believed in.
  • They chose a game engine and work within its bounds. They don’t complain about what it does not have, they just crank out great games.
  • They are aggregating their efforts in a rapidly evolving portal, Blurst, that is gaining traffic at a nice rate.

In summary, Flashbang is following all of the steps that I advocate in my Foundational Five article about surviving as a game developer. They have a small team of creative, like minded people, they have day jobs, they are creating innovative games, they are building a portfolio of company owned IP. In my mind, these guys, along with companies like Thatgamecompany, Behemoth, and 2D Boy are a new generation of rising stars that will be making the hits of the future. A couple of years from now, I think Blurst will have huge traffic, and these guys will be extremely successful.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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April 16, 2009
  • Pat Wilson

    These guys nailed the name for that game. The name “Off-road Velociraptor Safari” conjures up a game concept, and a snicker as soon as you read it. It conveys, to the gamer, a rough idea of what they will be doing in this game, and the light-hearted tone of the game itself.

  • imre

    There's only one thing I'd love to know: _where_ do they find all that contract work?
    But yeah, they really seem to be doing something in the right way.

    • http://coderhump.com Ben Garney

      They're talented. How many companies ship a game a year, much less one every 8 weeks? I bet they're beating off contract work inquiries with a stick with chops like that. :)

      Best place to get contract work especially when you're specialized (like with Unity) would be the community for that tool. Tied with networking in the industry so your name comes up when people need work.

      • http://www.redthumbgames.com joshuadallman

        Only six games a year? Slackers. Jeff had 'em beat in '89 with 8 games released that year. :)

        • http://www.topm.com Kevin Ryan

          1989 was the year before Sierra bought us and Dynamix was still fairly small. If I remember correctly we between 20-30 people at that time.

          • http://www.redthumbgames.com joshuadallman

            The whole history of Dynamix is in the book “High Score” (which I just found through google books, hence my reference) pages 144-147. There's even a picture of you and the gang at the top :)

            http://books.google.com/books?id=HJNvZLvpCEQC&p…

          • http://www.thestillofthenightcausesastorminthemind.com Jeremy Alessi

            I read that book cover to cover multiple times in 2002/2003, it was fantastic.

        • http://www.makeitbigingames.com Jeff Tunnell

          1989 was a hard year. We were working vary hard on our two Affiliated Publisher products, A-10 Tankkiller and David Wolf: Secret Agent, as well as a bunch of Activision products like Mechwarrior. It is kind of funny to think that 30+ developers could create 8 AA products in one year, but we did. In addition, a bunch of those games got great reviews and were very influencial. For instance, A-10 was one of the very first game to support 256 colors! Sound funny now, but it was nearly the equivalent of being the first to support 3D graphics cards. Going to 256 colors was one of the biggest visual differences in games ever.

  • Logan Foster

    I know we all have mouths to feed and bills to pay so I am not going to suggest that anyone who takes on a contract gigs for the main game-dev work to pay the bills is 'selling out', but anyone with any small amount of experiance can attest to how much more invigorating and enjoyable a project can be when you work on something you care about like these guys are able to do. You invest a bit of yourself into the project tend to put in the extra effort to add the little touches and effects that help make the project from something 'good' to something 'amazing'.

    I guess in some ways this is a pretty good commentary on the market and why a lot games continue to look at the 'indies' to product the next great it products versus the commercialized crap that the the AAA market seems content with developing. There rarely is any love left in AAA to have teams invest themselves into what they are doing, developers are stuck under the heel of “Do you want to keep getting paid? Well then do your work like I am telling you to” attitude of studios.

    Thanks for hiliting this company Jeff. I will definately have to go and take a look at their stuff.

  • http://www.redthumbgames.com joshuadallman

    Mathew Wegner and the guys at Flashbang are awesome. I'd love to see more highlights of indies “making it big” on this site. Great pick.

    As an aside, a friend emailed me a while ago and thought his bronto-in-a-jetpack game ripped off my turtle-in-a-jetpack-game which came first. Guess the meme of putting reptiles in jetpacks is a more common one than you'd think!

    • http://www.makeitbigingames.com Jeff Tunnell

      I have some more ideas for Indies Doing It Right. I'll post a now one from time to time. I am open to getting suggestions from the MBG community as well. If anybody has any ideas for successful Indies doing great things, let me know.

      • http://www.redthumbgames.com joshuadallman

        I'd also be interested in hearing about not just developers successful indies of all kinds. For example, not just developers but publishers, virtual worlds, social gaming. Big Fish Games started out of a garage with 2 guys, that's about as indie as it gets. Last month SuperSecret picked up $10 million VC funding, making it one of the best funded independent virtual worlds. And Zynga was formed by 6 guys less than 2 years ago and now has 46 million monthly active players, 4 times more than WoW's 12 million! I'd love to hear insights into these companies, or again, any indies off the obvious path in general.

  • http://www.diffusiongames.com Andrew

    The question, though, is how are they going to monetize all that IP? Ad rates are in the toilet at the moment ($0.50-$1 CPM's, if you're lucky), and to make any real money that way requires ludicrous amounts of eyeballs.

    So, port the games to other platforms? Some sort of microtransactions? Build it into something like a Unity-based version of Kongregate and sell it off? At the moment it's a great looking site, and the games are fun, but I don't see how they're going to stop having to do contract work anytime soon…

    • http://www.makeitbigingames.com Jeff Tunnell

      The advertising market will not always be in the toilet. In my article I was looking a few years out. The first step is getting a lot of fans to love you. Once you have that, you can make money from direct sales, micro-transactions, ads, and even subscriptions. Without an audience and community, you can implement all of that stuff you want, but you won't be able to make it.

      Also, taking your best games to XBLA or other paying platforms is a viable strategy. They don't seem to have a lot of desire to do so, but if they keep going, odds are they will create a game that becomes a huge hit. At that point, they will get approached by publishers willing to pay them to take their IP's to other platforms.

      Doing contract work for a few years while playing this strategy out is not such a bad thing. It looks to me like these guys are having a great time.

  • http://www.bringler.com Igre

    It's a shame that almost every time, when some independant guys make a really great game, some rich publisher comes around and spoils everything