Hey everybody, I’m Lucas Pope, lead programmer at Ratloop Asia. Our upcoming PSN game, Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken, got a few upgrades on the way to PS3, and I’d like to dive into some of the technical details of that transition. Hardboiled Chicken is a vastly expanded and improved game based on our earlier Flash release, Rocketbirds: Revolution. In going from Flash to the PS3, we added better controls, more screens, more chapters, more weapons, more enemies, and more gameplay modes. And we seriously upgraded the visuals. In this article, I’ll talk about some of those visual upgrades and how we did ‘em.

Rocketbirds

If you haven’t seen or played Rocketbirds, it’s a non-scrolling 2D game with a strong visual style. Think of classic 2D action-adventure games like Flashback, Oddworld, or Blackthorne. It could be considered a platformer, but there’s no scrolling and each screen is revealed whole-hog when you walk off the edge.

2D Like We Mean It

For the original Rocketbirds: Revolution, we kept things simple. Each screen had a static foreground image and a static background image that were composited together at runtime to make the final image. This is about the limit of what Flash can do quickly at 720p, but it all worked swimmingly and looked good enough for an IGF nomination.

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