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. I know VFP extremely well as a business application development environment.
But I’d never tried to write a game with it.
So I started with a simple question:
Could I make a spaceship move around the screen?
The answer was yes.
Then I added a starfield.
Then the ship could fire.
Then there were aliens.
Then collisions.
Then explosions.
Then sound.
At some point I connected a PS4 controller.
That worked too.
This has become something of a recurring theme.
Galactic Gladiators is still very much a work in progress, but what started as a small experiment has become one of the most enjoyable programming projects I’ve worked on in years.
I’m going to use this blog to document the development — including the things that work, the things that don’t, and the increasingly unreasonable things I discover Visual FoxPro can actually do.
I genuinely don’t know where this is going.
That’s rather the point.
