Summer 2010 has been kind to Nitric Burn: our first interns, a great new office, and steadily advancing progress on Rapstar Heroes.

Let me break down the highlights for you:

• In June, the team was delighted to welcome art and animation interns Caitlin Boyle and Theo Leung. They rolled up their sleeves and pitched in across the board: testing the Level Editor, adding to the pool of assets for Rapstar, editing promo content, and assisting with animations for a super-secret project (more on that after Rapstar drops). Having recently returned to their respective universities in Pennsylvania, they will be sorely missed.

Think you can fill the two-intern-sized hole in our hearts? Apply for one of our Fall Internships.

• In conjunction with moving across town (we're now operating just south of San Francisco's Mission district), the team has adopted a new project management system called Scrum. Productivity is skyrocketing and we're hoping to release playable preview content for Rapstar next month.

• Perhaps the most exciting development of the season is the amount of networking connections the studio's gained from designing a successful Kickstarter project. The site is booming, and as it gets more users and press, we seem to be grabbing some welcome trickle-down attention.

Most notably, we were thrilled to be contacted by the AnalogHype crew, whose blog seems built to dig Rapstar. In the past few weeks, they've blown us away with interest in supporting the game: not only will they be running a profile on their blog to promote the studio and the project, but also generously bought a host of background characters (via our Kickstarter incentives system), which we'll have posted up here next week. Enormous thank-you's all around.

As if that weren't enough, we've been talking to the super-friendly AnalogHype crew about working together on a project. Needless to say, we're ecstatic - collaboration is sort of our "thing." Surf over to their most excellent blog, and stay tuned for what promises to be an awesome confluence of talents.

Goodies are on the way. In the meantime, check out our revamped Gallery (with never-before-seen concept art from in-production games), and get ready for dev updates, reviews, and side-project coverage in our new Blogs section. Hope the summer has been equally good to you, and hope to have you back soon.