One of Tom’s suggestions for Galactic Gladiators was that the alien shouldn’t just suddenly appear on the screen. It should arrive through some sort of portal. At the time, I had no idea how I was going to do that in Visual FoxPro. Then I created the particle effect for the player’s explosion and realised … Read more
When the player died in Defender, the ship seemed to completely disintegrate. It wasn’t just an explosion graphic being shown for a few frames. Lots of individual pieces flew out across the screen. So I thought I would see if Visual FoxPro could do something similar. The first attempt uses 80 tiny FoxPro shape controls. … Read more
The latest slightly ridiculous experiment in Galactic Gladiators is screen shake. When the player’s ship is hit, the whole game moves around by a few pixels before returning to where it started. It is actually quite a subtle effect, but once it is there you can definitely feel the difference. The collision suddenly has a … Read more
One of the things I’m enjoying most about writing Galactic Gladiators in Visual FoxPro is discovering things that make me stop and think: “Hang on… FoxPro can do that?” The latest one started with BARF. BARF is the alien who appears on screen and communicates with the player. I’d already been playing around with animating … Read more
One of the things I remember from old arcade games is the curved shield in Gorf. And while working on Galactic Gladiators, I had one of those thoughts that is becoming increasingly dangerous: Could I do something like that in Visual FoxPro? Not just display a picture of a shield. I wanted a curved energy … Read more
Visual FoxPro 9 was released in 2004. The PlayStation 4 wasn’t released until 2013. Naturally, I decided the two should talk to each other. I’d already managed to get controller input working in Galactic Gladiators using XInput, which meant I could move the player’s ship using a PS4 controller. Then I had another thought. Could … Read more
Visual FoxPro 9 probably isn’t the obvious choice for writing an arcade game in 2026. In fact, it’s probably a terrible choice. Which is partly why I wanted to try it. I’ve spent much of my career developing software in Visual FoxPro, including LawnPro, a commercial application I’ve been developing for more than 20 years. … Read more