A strange thing happened this week. In a “secret forum” in a land far far away, there has been an on going challenge to create small games in as little time as possible. I LOVE these types of challenges because it’s something I thought I was good at. Well, in any event I proudly announced my decision to do a little shooter, something perhaps not worthy of calling “RetroShoot II” but still in the RetroShoot family. So “RetroShoot Arena” was announced last weekend. I was planning to have it done in 1-2 days, after all the fun of the challenge was to get something done as quickly as possible. well..something happened…..
I started throwing more and more into it, 2 layer parallax scrolling, starfields, 360 degree movement, lots of particles, fx, etc, etc. And then it hit me…”shit..this is looking fkin ace!” But one thing really has me excited. This game is throwing around alot more fx, more particles, more rendering / logic per frame, and it’s running faster than the original RetroShoot! Granted I’ve been making major modifications to my framework since the original RetroShoot was released, but every modification was made for “simplicity and understanding” rather than optimized performance. So I’ve done something along the way to make my Flash framework run alot faster. The problem is, I’m not really sure what it is! I didn’t do any benchmarking along the way to see if this or that way of doing things was faster or slower. I have a few guesses which might affect performance, but I’ll discuss those later. 
RetroShoot Arena – Weapons
One thing that RetroShoot was popular for was it’s “mouse only” control. But I really wanted to add new features to the next RetroShoot game, but keeping it mouse only control was 100% a feature I was not going to lose. No keyboard bashing, just a mouse and a button, that’s it. Lots of peeps mentioned the fact that you couldn’t select weapons in the first RetroShoot. Well, this is something I wanted to add in RetroShoot Arena, but since adding keyboard support was out of the question this obviously was a challenge. I’ve saved lots of comments from RetroShoot and PixelBlast players. Based on those comments, I spent quite a while working on a system that can handle weapon selection, bomb deployment, ship control, all while using just the mouse and mouse button.
Throwing In The Kitchen Sink
Like the original RetroShoot I’m coding this game on the seat of my pants, not really following any rules or project design sheet. As I write this I really don’t know how the game will end up. I want to spend a full week on it and then 1-2 days on final tweaks and polish. I can say I’m pretty much throwing everything I can at it. I’m having a blast with this “anything goes” approach.
So thanks to the guys at “The Board” who charged up my creative juices by challenging me to code a “game in a day”. Well…that didn’t work, but it will still be a game in “less than 2 weeks”. 
lol..
