etro Blaster - A look back, plus a new high score.

The first independent Flash game I ever released on the harsh Flash gaming public was my Asteroids/Blasteroids loving tribute called Retro Blaster. It was finished after many false starts, and well before Mochi or GameJacket allowed us to derive revenue from our games directly. I knew nothing about sponsorships and licensing (FGL would be started 6 months later). So, I sent out a few feeler emails to aGame and AddictingGames, as well as a couple software houses, but no one wanted to touch it with a 10 foot pole. That was very very difficult for me as I thought the game was brilliant (we all feel that about our babies, don't we). It was the Asteroids on Steroids game that I had always wanted to make (and play), but never could before. I spend an entire year of spare time on the game. Much of it was spent developing my own BitmapData engine for animating all of the sprites and particle explosions in AS2, well before I even knew others were attempting the same thing. It used 100's of movieclips (empty) with a BitmapData object attached to each. The objects would loop though array of BitmapData to simulate animation. It provided me with the optimizations necessary to display 500+ objects on the screen and made for simply the best blaster I had ever made...