The development of the actual game was something of a dynamic impulsive mess. We never set out to write a game, the game kind of wrote itself. Initially we were just working on sprite routines for animations, collision, particles, etc. Each time we designed something interesting we threw it in a prototype game shell to see how it looked on screen. After a couple of weeks we ended up with a dozen or so “waves” and we started to realize it was taking shape as a possible game.
“I had some cool looking retro graphics from a previous game I did in VB6 called RetroBlast plus I had a few graphics designed for me a while back which were never used in a game before. So I thought, what the hell let’s put them in this game.”
Now keep in mind, only 2 months earlier we looked at Flash for the first time. So alot of the code in RetroShoot is very generic based on simple bitmap raster operations. In any event we had a few dozen sprite images, a few dozen routines to move sprites around the screen so we started organizing the code into something that resembled a game. Looking back, perhaps one of the things that makes RetroShoot fun is there really isn’t any rules to this game. It’s very dynamic, never the same exact game twice.
RetroShoot took about 1 month to write from start to finish. The hardest part was actually turning all the prototype code into something that resembled a game. The mini games that were added to RetroShoot were part of those early sprite experiments. But instead of putting them in the game we decided to make them unlockable via acheivements.
RetroShoot was our first Flash game that we released for sponsorship. We found a sponsor fairly quickly but we never knew just how popular the game would become.
RetroShoot is also being ported to the iPhone, iTouch and should be available on those platforms sometime in Fall 2009.
RetroShoot II is also in the initial design phase.
Click on the image to play.
