This game was the genesis of what ultimately became the “Flynn” vector game engine that powers all of the Vector Alchemy games. My son Trayton and I created the first version for Mini Ludum Dare #56 with the design goals “Make the player dizzy” and “Use only 2 keys”.
Roundabout turned a huge corner when Trayton came up with the idea of adding knock-back to the shots. Suddenly you could control your descent speed (by firing), which made the game instantly more fun.
Back in 1998 I built a MAME arcade cabinet which I still have today. When we were developing Roundabout I put the project into Dropbox and synced it to the arcade machine. I’ve rarely had so much development fun as hitting save on my Mac, punching a button on the arcade machine (mapped to browser refresh), and instantly playing the change, standing up, in full retro arcade glory. It’s a great way to make games 🙂
Play Roundabout View on GitHub
