Fireslime is now Blue Fire
Published: 2021-08-19 13:07:26

TLDR: Fireslime, the team behind the Flame Engine, is changing their name to Blue Fire. We are also moving away from the idea of being just an indie game studio and want to focus more on maintaining Open Source projects and create an open and friendly community around those projects.

Almost 3 years ago, I (Erick) and Luan started a little project together. We both enjoyed game development, and after talking about some ideas, we created Fireslime, a small, informal, Indie Game Studio.

When Fireslime started, Luan had already created the very first version of Flame, a Flutter based game engine. Since we both liked learning and exploring new things, we decided to use Flame as the engine of our games; that way, we could slowly improve the engine, while we developed the game. But back then, our focus was mainly on building games, and not the game engine itself. Flame was just a means to an end for us, a tool to create our games.

As time passed, we created multiple games. We even fully released two of them, and launched two demo versions. They didn't manage to make much success on their own, but they helped us grow Flame.

Suddenly, we started to realize that the people who were in the community Discord (that we created for the Fireslime's games) were actually there because of the Flame Engine or the other open source projects we maintain, and not for the games themselves.

As the Flame Engine and our other projects grew, so did the time we spent on them. Which inadvertently meant that we spent less time working on our games.

Over time, more people joined the team as maintainers, the first to join was Renan, a software developer, bad gamer and bad comedian. After Renan the next one to join was  Lukas, a ​​developer, keyboard builder, backpacker and climber. And last but not least, Jochum, an open source enthusiast, GitLab fanboy, collector of strange linux devices and proud owner of a Commodore 64. And while the team grew, that initial idea of being a game studio was steadily fading.

So we decided to finally embrace this situation that we found ourselves in, and officially announce our new goal and focus: working on Open Source projects and building a friendly community around our Flutter and Dart projects.

Fireslime was a name that we decided on originally for a game studio, as it was playful and friendly. But with our new focus in mind, we wanted something different; something open and something that had its roots in both Fireslime and Flutter. So, as a team, we chose the name Blue Fire.

"Blue" expresses our focus and love for the Flutter framework and Dart, on which our projects are built and our community lives. And "Fire" represents our roots, our history and our connection to the Flame Engine.

Does that mean that we will no longer build games? No! Our biggest project is the Flame Engine, and the best way of validating and testing such a game engine, is to build games with it. But now that we have our goal and focus clear, we can honestly say that we are committed to Flame, Flutter and our other Open Source projects (be it our other libraries or games), with the hopes to help and grow both the Flame and Flutter community and their corresponding ecosystem.

So, from us as Fireslime, we thank everyone that has supported, helped and followed us over these last few years. And we hope you will all keep supporting us as Blue Fire as well, and be part of our community! 

The Blue Fire team wishes you happy coding.