Retro Blaster release candidate 1.0 is ready to play. All of my changes in the last few hours have had to do with speed and playability. The game still slows a little (a lot on some older machines) on the levels with the most objects moving, but it’s a HUGE improvement over Pixel War. The player can now only fire one mega bomb at a time. This helps the speed on the boss levels where firing multiple mega bombs was an easy way to send the game into “bullet time” for lack of a more derogatory term. It also makes the game a little more challenging. To even things out, the player now earns more bonus multiplier points for destroying a boss.
Try not to let the “system warps” screen wait time deter you from trying the game. I have heard that it is pretty slow on older PCs and MACs, but it runs in about 30 seconds on a newer PC. These routines allow me to cache all of the game animation loops in a set of relatively speedy bitmapData object arrays. Also, I am creating some math look up tables during this time that help speed up some of the calculations.