Archive for the ‘Art’ category

Retrobooster at CogsCon

April 20, 2014

Retrobooster will be available to try at CogsCon on Saturday, April 26 from 10am to 6pm. This is a nerd/art festival put on by students of CogsWell College in Sunnyvale, California. Registration is $20 at the door (free for children 5 and under). There will be local artists, video/card/board game competitions, and a cosplay contest, […]

Simulating Spiders

March 5, 2014

Spoilers ahead. If you do not want to learn about some of the more revolting monsters in Retrobooster, stop reading now. Cave-flyers commonly have stationary and flying enemies but not enemies that crawl along surfaces. These are probably left out because they are a lot of extra work, but they allow for fun new enemy […]

Retrobooster will soon be shown at a couple events in San Francisco. The first is CODAME’s 5ENSES, a festival for the five senses on November 1 and 2, 7pm-1am. The festival will include a game room where a few local indie studios will be showing their games. This event is enabled by donations. Please give […]

It has been a while since I posted anything about the tech in Retrobooster. Lately, I have been refining the conveyor beams, which figure prominently near the end of the game. They are basically tubes of energy that pull game entities around the levels. Think of them as rivers of space. I imagine them as […]

More Smoke and Dust

June 1, 2012

Viewers made some good suggestions about my Rocket Smoke Test video, so I made some improvements. Now the nominal smoke trail is much shorter and less distracting, but when your ship takes damage it gets longer and darker. It’s a good visual cue to help you know your ship’s health. There is now ground dust […]

Rocket Smoke Test

May 23, 2012

So an email arrived from this guy Grant with a whole bunch of good ideas for Retrobooster. Among them, he suggested there should be smoke coming out of the player’s ship. Thanks, Grant. In the video you can see the rocket smoke deflecting off of surfaces. That’s done with some very crude particle forces that […]