This video is a test of a new weapon I have been working on the last couple days. It shoots heavy matter slugs at super high velocity, so your ship’s velocity does not influence the projectile’s movement and it hits exactly where you are aiming. There is also a new laser dot on the terrain, […]

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 […]

Following are some notes on integrating various input devices into Retrobooster. I hope this is useful to other game designers and programmers. First of all, the original plan was to let players use keyboard, keyboard plus mouse, and game controllers. I’m happy to report that testers prefer each of these in roughly equal measure, so […]

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 […]

Programming lightning was way too much fun, so it would be silly to not give it a blog entry. Plenty of games have lightning, but the style and quality varies a lot. I wanted mine to be as realistic as possible. Later on, if I don’t think it fits with the style of the game, […]

In order to get Retrobooster to testers I decided to learn more about packaging software. I ended up making an installer for Windows with Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS) and an RPM for Linux. NSIS was an easy choice because I had already used it to make an installer Really Slick Screensavers, but RPM was […]