Retrobooster Instructions

How to play

Using the menu screens, start the Tutorial or a New Game.

Fly your thrust ship, rescue survivors, destroy anything that tries to hurt you, and find your way to the end of each level. On some levels it is not readily apparent how to escape, and you will need to find the way out. For example, you may be required to rescue all the survivors or solve a puzzle that the evil aliens have constructed.

This is a survival shooter game, so most players will be challenged to survive all the levels. It is also a skill-based game, so you will get better and better as you hone your flying and shooting skills. As you master the controls you may want to play for high scores.

Controls

Retrobooster can be controlled with keyboard only, mouse and keyboard combined, or a USB game controller. Controls can be customized using the Controls menu.

Universal controls

Use any of these key commands while Retrobooster is running.

Key	Function
Esc	Pause game and display menu.
F1	Toggle frames-per-second (FPS) meter in the upper-right corner.
Alt + Enter	Switch between fullscreen and windowed modes. This feature is slightly unreliable and may be removed from the final version of Retrobooster. For now, I want to see what testers think of it. Do you prefer to play in windowed mode for some reason?

Default mouse and keyboard settings

thrust forward	up arrow key	left mouse button
thrust backward	down arrow key	right mouse button
rotate left	left arrow key
rotate right	right arrow key
fire main weapon	f
fire secondary weapon	d
next main weapon	r	mouse wheel up
previous main weapon	e	mouse wheel down
next secondary weapon	v
previous secondary weapon	c
select specific weapon	1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0

You can also rotate your ship by moving the mouse side-to-side. (Moving the mouse forward and back has no effect.)

Default USB game controller settings

Game controllers come in many styles with different numbers of inputs. Therefore, it is impossible to describe default settings for all game controllers. Retrobooster recognizes some popular game controllers and initializes with sensible default controls. Your game controller may or may not be recognized. If the default controls for your game controller are not satisfactory, you can configure them in the Controls menu.

Controls menu

Use this menu to assign specific input devices to each player. If you want to customize the controls for an input device, click the Configure button beneath the device name.

On the device configuration screen, click on a specific input that you want to change and it will begin flashing. If you are configuring keyboard and mouse, press a keyboard key or mouse button. If you are configuring a game controller, press a button, d-pad, or axis on the controller. If you want to leave the control input empty, press Esc.

When configuring the keyboard and mouse, you can also adjust the mouse sensitivity.

When configuring a game controller, you can also select an axis to assign to thrust and an axis to assign to rotation.