That's right!

You'll be able to play Snapshot at PAX Prime this year along with the other games being recognized in PAX 10. While you're travelling the expo hall during the show, keep an eye out for the PAX 10 booth as well as any Snapshot banners.

We had a blast being in the Boston Indie Showcase at PAX East, and can't wait to show the game off again.

If all goes as planned, Myself (Programming), Peter (Business and Art), Kyle (Art and Design), and WiL (Music) will all be there. Stop by and say hi, or ask us anything about the game.

Hey Everyone!

It's been a while since we've posted anything here, and I just want to throw a real quick update here.

We're hard at work getting more content and code into Snapshot. Last month at E3 we had some great meetings which I'm sure you'll hear about soon. Hopefully you'll soon learn the final platforms that Snapshot with launch on, be able to buy some merchandise, and how you can play the game before it's released!

We can't announce anything quite yet, but be prepared to start hearing lots of great news about Snapshot in the coming weeks.

-Dave

Hey everyone, check it out!

The awesome developers over at Ronimo Games sent over some Steam Keys for their game Swords and Soldiers.



If you don't already own it for WiiWare or PSN, then you should certainly check it out on PC.

I'll just leave these here:
FZ52E-BVNMG-BEM7I-XNSLG-9IZTV
FZ52E-BVM5L-X4MNQ-FICXW-T2Q5P
FZ52E-BVDWA-KYMF7-YN3J2-EJ46N
FZ52E-BVCR3-AYFZ3-C8L8P-SXCS5
FZ52E-BVBFI-S5KSI-Q3FH5-6SVM2

We'll also be tweeting some more, so be sure to Follow Us to make sure you don't miss them!

We all love using Lua to write custom scripts for our game objects, and we also love using Notepad++ to edit those scripts. It basically has everything you'd want in a text editor, plus some.



After hunting on the internet for a bit, we realized that there wasn't a good Lua language file for Notepad++ (at least, we couldn't find one). So we decided to take a little bit of time and create a Lua language file which supports the auto complete feature of Notepad++.

Using this you'll get awesome dropdown boxes as you type built in Lua functions. It'll also show you what parameters you can pass into the functions, as well as the documentation for them.

DOWNLOAD IT HERE!

To use it, follow these steps:
1. Download the LuaLangFile.zip from the link above
2. Extract the lua.xml file into the Notepad++ installation directory, under plugins/APIs. (For me this is in C:\Program Files (x86)\Notepad++\plugins\APIs)
3. Open up Notepad++, and go into Settings->Preferences. Under the Backup/Auto-Completion tab, make sure to check "Enable auto-completion on each input", as well as "Function parameters hint on input"

There are a few issues with it at the moment. Firstly, every function is listed as returning void. I couldn't really come up with a good solution to functions which could return different types of data, so I left them all as is. Second, the descriptions for functions with a "." in them (like, math.abs) don't show up. I'm not exactly sure why this is.

If anyone else wants to add to the language file, feel free to post new revisions here or send us an email at info@retroaffect.com as we'll post updates here in the blog.

Happy Scripting!

One thing we've been asked over and over is what our lua scripting support is like. I'm not going to go into the details on how to call lua functions from C++ (However, if you are interested in a tutorial on this then let me know in our IRC channel here). It's pretty easy to get up and going with it.



In a nutshell, using lua in a game engine is sort of like handing the keys to the car you built over to another driver. They can drive it however fast or slow they want to now instead of just sitting in the back seat giving you directions. Eventually they'll take the car off of some sick jumps that you probably would have just driven around otherwise. It'll be a ton of fun and you'll be happy to see just what your car can do! Then one day they'll slam your car right into a tree. Yeah, that's exactly what it's like.

Click Read More to here how we use lua in RAE...

There's two things I wanted to talk about today. First, we've never really given you a high level list of everything the engine does for us. Allow me to enlighten you...

RAE features:
* A fully integrated level editor - Includes tools for placing, rotating, and scaling objects as well as placing world geometry, physics joints, and more
* Component based objects system - Objects comprised of Gibs (as in "instagib", where a guy explodes into a bunch of little pieces or "gibs")
* Physics based gameplay - Currently using Box2d
* Custom scripted objects and levels using Lua
* N levels of parallax support
* Cross platform - Runs on Windows and Linux. OSX is currently under development
* 2d Animation system
* Internal Event system within the engine - Instances of C++ objects can subscribe/unsubscribe for event callbacks
* Custom 2d Lighting system
* Positional sound support - Currently uses the OpenAL library
* ...and more...

Secondly, I've had a lot of questions about our Game Objects and Gibs. Let me describe to you a little bit more about how we create objects for the game...

We use a component based object system, and we call our components "Gibs". I won't go into detail about the pros and cons of a component based object system right now, but instead I'll describe what we love about ours.

The engine has a few built in gibs which support adding animations, sprites, physics, or scripts to a game object. New game-specific gibs can be created outside of the engine code and registered with the engine before the main loop starts. This allows game programmers to create new C++ gibs which add their game specific functionality. For Snapshot, we take advantage of this to create specific types of objects and to set up our player specific code to the object representing the player. When an object is first constructed, it traverses through the data for the object, which typically is pulled from a GO file or level file. In addition to adding gibs during creation time, the engine supports adding and removing gibs to an object at runtime. Multiple gibs of the same type can also be added to a single game object. For example, a game object can have N number of sprites or physics components added to it, allowing it to interact with the world in a new an interesting way.

Finally, through the use of the script gib, the engine allows Lua scripts to be tied to any object. Objects with a Lua script receive callbacks when the object is updating, being created or destroyed, when physics gibs attached to the same object receive contact callbacks, and at many other times.


We're going to continue publishing videos showing off what decisions we've made with our tech along the way. If you have any questions about how any of our tech was written, feel free to jump into our Live Chat!

Fall Damage just released their newest podcast, which features an interview with Retro Affect. We talked about Snapshot, as well as a game Kyle made before Retro Affect was formed, Verge.

Be sure to check it out:
http://www.fall-damage.com/2010/01/fall-damage-level-18-the-slash-forums-show/

Hello Internet!

I'm Dave. Software Neurosurgeon here at Retro Affect. I joined Pete and Kyle just after March of this year, the three of us founded Retro Affect, and since then I've been developing the engine behind our games. Someday soon we might give you an introduction to the engine to show off what we've been working on and some of the neat stuff it's going to allow us to do. Keep an eye on the site, you may like what you see.

I've been working on video games for a few years now. Mainly developing game systems for MMOs. It's a huge change to be working on the Retro Affect Engine, but it's got all it's own challenges.

So, now I'm hanging out in Gilbert, AZ and it's a great time of the year to be down here. Video games and golf on the weekends, and developing games during the week. Not a bad deal, eh?