The wait is over! We’re very proud to announce that our cinematic platform adventure title Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken is fully cooked, boiled and ready to serve up exclusively on PSN starting with today’s PlayStation Store update.

Building upon our critically-acclaimed browser-based game; “Rocketbirds: Revolution!”, it has been a real adventure for us working on “Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken” and when it came down to putting together the launch trailer, it made me realize just how far the Rocketbirds have come! The one thing I really wanted for this launch trailer was for it to use the awesome Rocketbirds Theme song, which New World Revolution put together especially for the game! So, here it is, enjoy!

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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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Being the creator of the Rocketbirds and being the only European team member of Ratloop (I’m the Belgian) it gives me great pleasure to post something here about our upcoming cinematic platform game, titled “Rocketbirds: Hardboiled Chicken”!

Rocketbirds gets its stylistic influences from the European comics I read when I was growing up – When I started reading comics, it was Ravian, Tin Tin, Asterix, Storm, Lucky Luke, then later, as a teenager (and beyond), I started following comic book artists such as Jean Giraud, Simon Bisley and Jamie Hewlitt. I’d always liked reading the absurdist tales of the 2000 AD comics (Judge Dredd, ABC Warriors etc.), so I decided to tell a dark, absurdist tale of my own in Rocketbirds.

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