Blurst Technology

Welcome, everybody, to the Blurst technology blog!  This will be our oulet for sharing code, tutorials, and lessons learned from the Flashbang game mines.  We’re doing this to give back to the tremendous Unity community and to help out our fellow game developers.

Unity History

Unity is the engine that powers all of the games you see on Blurst.  It’s a fantastic piece of software, and we’re very happy to have found it.  I first discovered Unity back in December 2006.  At the time, we were still using Virtools, but were unhappy with the evolution of the software and the direction of their company.  I was actively researching other engines when I came across a development contest Unity was sponsoring.  It was the perfect opportunity to give Unity a test drive.  I worked with Adam Mechtley (now one of our in-house artists) and created I Hate Clowns.  I was hooked.

It took awhile to come back to Unity full-time, since we still had internal Virtools projects and external contract work.  In September, 2007, we finally shifted gears to making our own games and began hiring to expand the team.  The games we created eventually laid the foundation and vision for Blurst.  Today we have 6 guys and work with Unity on a daily basis.  It’s fantastic.

Lessons Learned

We’ve been using Unity for awhile now.  Next month we’re scheduled to launch our fifth major Unity game, Minotaur China Shop, along with three iPhone titles made with their new iPhone publishing features.  Needless to say, we’ve learned a lot about Unity.  Our goal here is to share scripts, code snippets, and full-fledged tutorials to help other developers accelerate their learning curve.  We’ve solved quite a few problems; it doesn’t make sense for other people to re-invent the wheel.

Topics

Specifically, we’ve done quite a lot with:

• Physics
• Shaders
• Web integration

But we’ll also be sharing more general solutions to organizational challenges any Unity developer will face (editor/library scripts, how we manage messages, etc).

Blog Format

We’ll be posting snippets as we find time.  We’ll probably be quieter as we approach our deadlines, and then very active as we have more time to collect our thoughts and organize code.  We actually ran a very similar blog years ago, in the Virtools days, where we posted experiments along with source code (DevLab is still online, if anyone is curious).

If you guys have questions on anything we post, please post questions in the comments!  If you’d like to contact us directly to suggest a topic or prod us on any particular subject, we can easily be reached at contact@blurst.com.