Retroburn Game Studios - Gearing up for release news

Retroburn Game Studios was founded in early 2009 by Martin Caine in an effort to create high quality games with minimal budgets. Since then the group has grown in size and now consists of over 20 talented designers, artists, programmers, composers, modellers and more.

The first few game concepts were decided upon in early 2009 and further games have begun development since that time also. Retroburn works in small teams in each individual game with a few of it's contributors working on multiple projects. Although each project is unique and individual we aim to bring the highest quality to our work and don't want to release anything that doesn't meet our high expectations.

Martin began programming the base engine and learning XNA / C# before Retroburn was founded and that engine has now grown into a stable development platform for many styles of game. Martin's high standards have pushed the development of the engine to it's current state and we are now approaching a point where we're happy with the overall look and feel of our games.

Our current in-development projects cover a wide variety of game styles and genres while attempting to bring something fun and unique to the market. Below you can find some details on our in-development games:

See and Learn
The first game we started developing and the idea is simple enough but creating the art work (or buying art work with our minimal budgets) proved to be a long-winded process. The game is a very simple learning game primarily for children (Martin's Son and Daughter play test the game). It displays a number of photos on the screen and you are prompted to select one. A very simple game but we have been working on adding more modes and more levels to the game as we don't feel it's worth the minimum price point on XBLIG yet in it's current state. The game will be released on XBLIG and a WP7 port has already been created.

Started in mid 2009, Shadow Racers is a 3D arcade racing game mixing pieces from other classic racing games. This game has the widest scope of all our in-development projects and also requires much more artwork than our other games which is taking up the majority of development time. The game contains a short but well crafted single player campaign and multiplayer racing modes. The game will be released on XBLIG and we also plan to release on Windows Phone 7 (WP7) once we have created mobile-friendly models and artwork.

One of the first game concepts we began working on, Ultra Pool is a classic arcade style Pool/Billiards game. The game is intended to be easy to play and is very simply styled. We decided not to have environments to distract the player or actual animated player characters as we believe the game should focus on the actual gameplay and not the frilly extras. The game features multiple game modes including 8 Ball, 9 Ball and Rotation. The game contains single player modes but is really intended to be played with other players and has a variety of multiplayer game modes. The game is to be released on XBLIG and a WP7 version is currently being play-tested to determine the best control system for the touch screen interface.

A tower defense game in the style of Desktop Tower Defense with a bright neon geometric style. This game began development in mid 2010 and has many game modes programmed in. The prototype of the game is being tested currently while we are redesigning some of the game's graphics. The game is single player only and will be released on XBLIG and we may consider a WP7 version in the future.

While developing Shadow Racers we soon came to realise the massive potential of our XNA based game engine and began to look at other possible game ideas we could create using the same base engine as Shadow Racers uses. The concept is based on the Crash mode of the Burnout games and plays in very much the same way. We are currently testing the beta version of the game and have spent much of the development time tweaking the physics and damage systems to make the game re-playable. The game will be released on XBLIG, currently we have no plans for a WP7 version as we don't think the phone will be able to accurately model the damage and physics systems.

Another racing game in the making, this one is a much simpler concept and we intend to release this game before releasing our other two racing games. The game allows you to build your own racetracks using a straight-forward track editor allowing you to create the layout, add checkpoints and then set your laptimes yourself by racing on your track. You can then share your track on Xbox Live with other players who can also set their lap times. We think the game is perfect for XBLIG and hope that the user-generated content and the nature of the game will help build a community of players who build and share tracks amongst themselves. The game will be released on XBLIG and we're also creating a WP7 to be released at a later date.

Created in early 2010, this game at first was a simple little game created for the XNA7day challenge website (http://xna7day.com). Martin created the first version in just one day and the game has now grown to include many more game modes and an updated set of graphics. The game features single player and multiplayer game modes and now contains many variants on the classic memory game which make you think in different ways. The game will be released on XBLIG and a WP7 port has already been created.

This game was developed while porting our XNA engine from XNA3.1 to XNA4 (and WP7). The game is a very simple sliding-tile puzzle game with multiple difficulties (number of tiles) and other game modes. We used it to test out the touch API in XNA4 as the concept was simple enough to quickly get developed. During development we have rewritten a number of sections of the engine and now the XNA4/WP7 version of the engine is very different to our XNA3.1 engine. The game will be released on WP7 and we are deciding wether or not to release a version on XBLIG.

This was another of the first concepts we came up with. Unfortunately the original idea was too complex and we recently redesigned the game concept while keeping much of the gameplay as we had hoped and removing some other elements. The game originally was intended to be a blend of top down helicopter shooter and FPS. The development of the levels and characters for the FPS segment of the game was progressing very slowly and so that part of the game has been dropped. We may in future release the game as we had originally intended it to be, possibly as a sequel or an entirely new game. Now the game is primarily a helicopter shooter but we are still tweaking the environments and effects for the game. The game will be released on XBLIG but currently we have no plans to create a WP7 port.

There we have it, quite a lot of games in active development! Our teams have been working very hard on their respective games over the past year and a half and we're all looking forward to releasing more media in the coming months. We hope we can bring our high quality games to both XBLIG and WP7 and possibly create games for other platforms in the future!