39w ago - 24 Caret Games Co-founder Matt Gilgenbach announced that Retro / Grade's backwards battle officially begins today!

From the official announcement, to quote: It's been a long journey since our first post about Retro/Grade over three years ago.

We've worked very hard creating the best game we possibly can since then - if you saw the three year old screenshots, you'll notice that it's barely recognizable as the polished product you see today.

Besides all the visual polish we added - like jaw-dropping effects and full HD 1080p rendering at 60 frames-per-second with anti-aliasing - we've added a ton of content.

Although we have a campaign mode, challenge mode is really the star of Retro/Grade. It's where the real meat of the game lies. In challenge mode, you are presented with a galaxy map, and you go through playing various challenges that are based on the campaign levels, but with various twists and rule changes.

For example, in some of the challenges, the music is sped up, which naturally makes completing the level more difficult. We also have challenges that require you to reach certain score targets, have trickier patterns, and plenty more! There are 130 challenges spanning a map filled with secret paths, warps, and rewards.

What kind of...

41w ago - 24 Caret Games Co-founder Matt Gilgenbach has outlined today how to play a reverse shooter as part of some new Retro / Grade tips below.

To quote: We recently announced that Retro/Grade, the first game played entirely in reverse, would be releasing exclusively on PSN on August 21st.

Understanding and developing a game that is played in reverse is tough, so I want talk about how it all works.

Firstly, how did we design a game played in reverse? We worked backwards of course! We started with the idea that it'd be cool to play a game where time is flowing backwards, but we didn't have any ideas on how to pull that off. We did a lot of brainstorming - time reversing is a hard concept to wrap your head around.

We figured for gameplay purposes, undoing your actions would be the best fit for that theme. When undoing, you have to match both the timing and the position of previous actions.

When matching timing, music is the best way to achieve that, so we thought rhythm gameplay would be the best mechanic to build the game around. We figured a 2D game where your motion is constrained to a few discrete lanes would make it easier to match the positions.

A 2D spaceship shooter seemed like a great fit for the theme, so we tried to incorporate elements from...