Retro/Grade - PSN Rhythm Shooter in Reverse - Out August 21 - $9.99

!NSP no desaeler eb lliw ,esrever ni yleritne deyalp emag tsrif eht ,edarG/orteR… errr… Sorry! I’m used to time being reversed. What I was trying to say is that Retro/Grade, the first game played entirely in reverse, will be released on PSN! Actually, let me start from the beginning. I’m Matt Gilgenbach, co-founder of 24 Caret Games. We are proud to announce that we will be releasing our first game, Retro/Grade, on the Playstation Network for Playstation 3. Retro/Grade stars ace fighter pilot Rick Rocket who has just saved the universe. Unfortunately, the massive destruction he left in his wake has caused a temporal anomaly that reversed the flow of time. You must assume control of Rick’s spacecraft and fight through the epic space battle… in reverse!




At this point, you may be thinking, “How on earth do you play a game in reverse?” That is a very good question, and after many years of temporal physics research, we’ve finally come up with the solution. As you can see from our screenshots, Retro/Grade looks like a really exciting shoot ‘em up. However, it actually plays more like a rhythm game. In order to protect the health of the space/time continuum, Rick must undo his actions exactly the reverse of the way he performed them in the first place. That means he has to get in the appropriate space lane from which his shot was fired and press the shoot button at the appropriate time. As well, he must avoid blocking the path of the enemy shots as they return to the enemy’s guns. If he blocks their path, it creates a paradox since he is stopping the shot before it was ever fired. All of the gameplay is timed to original retro themed tunes by Skyler McGlothlin, aka acclaimed electronica artist Nautilis. Retro/Grade earned a nomination for Excellence in Audio at the IGF because of our great tunes.

Trailer: http://www.viddler.com/explore/sceablog/videos/459/

One feature in Retro/Grade that we are really excited about is the ability to pilot Rick’s ship using a guitar controller. You can use the fret buttons to move Rick’s ship to the desired space lane, and the strum bar acts as the shoot button. It’s a lot of fun to use the guitar, but it is equally fun with the DualShock 3 controller if you don’t have any guitar controllers handy. Players that play a lot more rhythm games will probably feel more comfortable wielding a plastic guitar whereas shoot ‘em up junkies looking for an innovative twist on the beloved genre will feel more comfortable with their trusty DualShock 3.



Retro/Grade features many innovative power ups including the ability to reverse time (again). You may be thinking, “But wait Matt… Time is already reversed!” This power up allows you to reverse the reversed flow of time, so time moves forward! Although that sounds confusing, the gameplay effect is really exciting! It allows you to undo any mistakes you’ve mde made and repeat a section again. This is extremely helpful for when you hit a hard section that requires a little more practice or you lose the rhythm and start making mistakes. Once you play Retro/Grade, you are sure to bemoan that other rhythm games don’t have that feature.

All of these compelling features earned us a nomination for Excellence in Game Design at the Independent Games Festival. There’s plenty more to get excited about that we aren’t ready to announce just yet. Stay tuned, and we will update you Playstation Blog readers with more information as development progresses! If you want to stay up to date, be sure to follow 24 Caret Games on Facebook!

Click to expand...

Greetings, PlayStation.Blog readers! We recently announced that Retro/Grade, the first game played entirely in reverse, would be releasing exclusively on PSN on August 21st. Understanding and developing a game that is played in reverse is tough, so I want talk about how it all works.

Firstly, how did we design a game played in reverse? We worked backwards of course! We started with the idea that it’d be cool to play a game where time is flowing backwards, but we didn’t have any ideas on how to pull that off. We did a lot of brainstorming — time reversing is a hard concept to wrap your head around. We figured for gameplay purposes, undoing your actions would be the best fit for that theme. When undoing, you have to match both the timing and the position of previous actions. When matching timing, music is the best way to achieve that, so we thought rhythm gameplay would be the best mechanic to build the game around. We figured a 2D game where your motion is constrained to a few discrete lanes would make it easier to match the positions.

A 2D spaceship shooter seemed like a great fit for the theme, so we tried to incorporate elements from sidescrolling shooters on top of our rhythm game core. Rick Rocket, the hero in Retro/Grade, must un-fire his shots, which are timed to the beat of the game’s music. Rick is equipped with basic lasers, but he’s also got a range of special weapons that he will un-fire, since shmups usually tend to feature awesome special weapons. All player fire has to make sense when time is moving backwards, so if the player makes a mistake and doesn’t unfire a shot correctly, it damages the space/time continuum, which is what you’ll be trying to preserve instead of health in Retro/Grade. Too much damage to the continuum and it’s the end of the entire universe!

One of the greatest parts of sidescrolling shooters is weaving through crazy patterns of enemy fire. We wanted to use that in Retro/Grade, but enemy fire works a bit differently since time is reversed. The player still has to dodge enemy fire, but it is returning to the guns that fired it. If the path is blocked, then it is preventing the shots from being fired, which creates a paradox. Paradoxes damage the space/time continuum, so Rick must carefully avoid enemy shots while getting into position to unfire his shots.

Now that you understand how we came up with the design and what it is, how is it actually played? When we were still brainstorming how the game would work, we realized that if we have five or less discrete lanes, a guitar controller would be a great control mechanism — Retro/Grade is a rhythm game at its core, after all. From the beginning of development, we designed the game for both the guitar and the DualShock in order to ensure that one scheme isn’t easier than the other.

With the DualShock, Retro/Grade plays a lot like a shooter. Up and down move your ship one space lane up and down, and the X button unfires your projectile. When playing with a guitar controller, you press the colored fret button to move your ship to the corresponding lane, and strum to unfire. We also have a Retro/Rocket power up, which allows Rick to reverse the flow of time again (forwarding it) allowing him to undo mistakes and try again. The circle button, or whammy bar, will summon this power.

Sounds confusing right? It really isn’t! Understanding how everything fits into the fiction of the game world with time reversing is complicated, but the actual gameplay is easy to pick up. It’s all about dodging enemy shots and un-firing yours, and everything is timed to the beat of our awesome original soundtrack by Skyler McGlothlin. We spent a lot of time putting together a tutorial that introduces all the concepts slowly but surely, so if you aren’t sold on the game yet, be sure to try the demo once it’s available.

Retro/Grade will be available for $9.99 on PSN August 21st, or you can get a bundle featuring the game and soundtrack for $14.99. The soundtrack will be available by itself for $7.99, so if you want both, the bundle will save you $3. Thanks for reading, and I can’t wait to see you all on the Retro/Grade leaderboards!

Click to expand...

Hello PlayStation.Blog readers! Firstly, if you aren’t familiar with Retro/Grade, check out our previous post for an explanation about how fighting battles backwards works. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Now that you’re all caught up, we can get started. It’s been a long journey since our first post about Retro/Grade on the PS.Blog over three years ago. We’ve worked very hard creating the best game we possibly can since then — if you saw the three year old screenshots, you’ll notice that it’s barely recognizable as the polished product you see today. Besides all the visual polish we added — like jaw-dropping effects and full HD 1080p rendering at 60 frames-per-second with anti-aliasing — we’ve added a ton of content.

Although we have a campaign mode, challenge mode is really the star of Retro/Grade. It’s where the real meat of the game lies. In challenge mode, you are presented with a galaxy map, and you go through playing various challenges that are based on the campaign levels, but with various twists and rule changes. For example, in some of the challenges, the music is sped up, which naturally makes completing the level more difficult. We also have challenges that require you to reach certain score targets, have trickier patterns, and plenty more! There are 130 challenges spanning a map filled with secret paths, warps, and rewards.

What kind of rewards, you ask? All sorts! We have cheats that turn on fun gameplay features like big heads, disco lighting, a film noir look, and more. We also have 11 unlockable ships, some of which feature characters from other indie games like Meat Boy, Minecraft, Octodad, and Go Home Dinosaurs. We also reward you by unlocking tracks in the music player. While that may not sound too interesting (especially if you bought the soundtrack), our music player is set up like a DJ deck with two turntables, which means you can scratch and mix the unlocked sounds to your heart’s content!

If challenge mode doesn’t sound like it interests you, campaign mode will keep you coming back for more. You can compete on one of our many leaderboards for the different songs and modes — don’t worry, we have separate leaderboards for guitar and DualShock controllers, just in case you feel that one control scheme has an advantage.

Retro/Grade is available today for $9.99, or in a bundle with the soundtrack for $14.99. The soundtrack, which is in AAC format and is copyable to a USB memory stick, is also available separately for $7.99. We have a demo available, so if you’re not yet completely sold on this reverse-shooter, now is your chance to try it out! Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you on the leaderboards!

Click to expand...