The History of FLAT
FLAT was initially created for the <a href = 'http://7dfps.org'>7 Day FPS Challenge</a> in June 2012. Johan "SteelRaven7" Hassel, Josh "Cheeseness" Bush and Johannes "JohannesMP" Peter worked a grueling schedule to get the game playable from scratch within a week. With little sleep and less time to spare, they released a playable build of FLAT, which, while still rough around the edges, was enjoyable and challenging.
In the week following the 7DFPS event, Cheeseness added additional features, art assets and gameplay fixes to make a more polished "post-7DFPS" build available. Cheese also worked with composer Anton Riehl, who had offered to write a score for the game, and implemented a simple context sensitive music system.
Some blogs from this period of development can be found on the <a href = 'https://web.archive.org/web/20120614074524/http://7dfps.org/?projects=flat'>Internet Archive's Wayback Machine</a> and Cheese's <a href = 'http://twolofbees.com/blog.php?pid=62'>blog post</a> on twolofbees.com.
In July 2012, SteelRaven7, Cheeseness and JohannesMP decided to release FLAT under the GPL in order to make it more accessible and give others the opportunity to learn from or improve the game. Remaining todo list items were added as "issues" to indicate the planned direction for the project.
In November 2021, FLAT v1.1 was released, rolling in community contributions alongside balancing improvments, a hint system, a new menu system, and gameplay settings. To celebrate this and the game launching on Itch.io, Cheese published a <a href = 'https://cheeseness.itch.io/flat/devlog/311519/origins-and-inspirations'>series</a> of <a href = 'https://cheeseness.itch.io/flat/devlog/311644/post-jam-development'>blog</a> <a href = 'https://cheeseness.itch.io/flat/devlog/313838/9-years-later'>posts</a> looking at the different periods of FLAT's development.