very cool dude named Jason has submitted the current high score (other than mine) for Retro Blaster. It stands at 99,734,135. Send me your scores as a PNG,/JPG/ BMP/GIF screen cap and I'll post them too.
I have been searching the local stores for a copy of Konami Arcade for the DS. It seems to be as hard to find as Puzzle Quest right now. I took my 16 year-old nephew, Jeremy, with me to some local shops and we couldn't find it anywhere.
have Have been busy fixing bugs and tweaking settings in retro Blaster. The most significant change I have made was suggested by my old pal, Ian Legler. He suggested that I add a user selectable setting to adjust the quality of the graphics. I have added this option now (shoe-horned into the main menu). It mainly affects the size and quality of the explosions and defaults to a lower setting than the original version (Medium). Thanks for the idea, Ian.
have finally had a chance to play my own game all the way through and beat IRATA without cheating. My top score is 973,441,870. I have also found that even though I have put optimization upon optimization into the animation sprite map caching, it still cannot compensate for the giant amount of logic needed for collision detection and bitMapData swapping when there are 100's of animations (or very large ones) on the screen. In any case, I am satisfied with the game and will now move on to something else. I will continue to refine this engine and hopefully the next game will have even more performance improvements. The high score boards for 8bitrocket.com are not complete yet, so you cannot post your scores, but if you take a screen shot and send it to jeff@8bitrocket.com or info@8bitrocket.com, I'll post the highest so you can reap all the fame and fortune that is bestowed on reaching such a plateau.
Also, I am just now posting the final release of the game. I had made a mistake in the last release and left in the code that resets the high score table every time you play. That is fixed now. Thanks to all those who sent in the error.
Try Retro Blaster Now!
hanks to everyone who helped me beta test .90.
It has taken me a full year to get to this point. When you work full time and have a wife and young son, it is very difficult to find time to make a game. Anyway again, thanks to Steve Fulton, Chris Cutler, Ian Legler, Marc Manalli, and Alan Donnelly, as well as a couple folks at Gamerdad.com for looking at the last version. I have incorporated as much of your feed back as possible in this version.
Try Retro Blaster!
eff sent me a beta release of Retro Blaster and I have posted it. You can play it right now and start blasting everything in your path. If only I would tell you what the link is...
ight now, Steve is putting the final touches on the technical design for our 8bitrocket.com site. It won’t be spectacular looking, but that is because we want a pretty basic site. While he is doing that, I am finishing up my latest game called Retro Blaster. It is basically Asteroids, but I have put a lot of work into the Actionscript animation engine, so it is more of a tech demo that has ballooned into a much larger game.
Retro Blaster uses a relatively new Flash 8 technique that I call bitmap animation caching. It is an idea that I got from a short optimization conversation I had with Jobe Makar (http://www.electrotank.com/) about blitting objects on the screen in Flash. One of the largest resource hogs in Flash is the rendering engine.
