Blast Works: Build, Trade, & Destroy will finally launch in North America next Tuesday, so now seems like a fitting time for Budcat Creations pair Marcus Brown and Matt Modaff to update their IGN blog and reflect on numerous aspects of the game's lengthy gestation. Fortunately for this post, that's exactly what they did!

Amongst other things, Brown and Modaff discuss the team's motivation for including the game's wonderful editor, the content sharing features that we adore so much, and how they'd like to see the game cultivate a modding community to rival those seen in many PC titles. They also reserve special praise for the Wiimote, noting how it "affords players a near mouse-like interface."

Most intriguingly of all, there's a list of features that didn't quite make the final cut, mainly due to time constraints. These include the ability to play through the Campaign Mode with four players (there's still a two-player function), a "Marathon Mode" (in which players blast their way through an infinite selection of levels randomly chosen from the campaign and rack up the highest score possible), a "Movement Editor" (for editing, yes, the movement of enemies), and the ability to trade high scores.

Despite all of that "missing" stuff, some of which sounds way cool, we'd still probably trade our closest family members in for a copy of Blast Works next week.