Early solo project · GameMaker
Retro Duel
A local two-player fencing game: battle your way to victory atop an ever-shrinking stage using a mix of parries, thrusts, dodges, and finesse. Choose from a variety of swords and game modes, each with its own strengths to play to and weaknesses to exploit in your foe's. This was one of the earliest projects I built while teaching myself game development, well before Bow Tie Cat Studios existed.
How to play
Retro Duel is a free download, no install required.
- 1 Download Retro Duel — Windows below.
- 2 Unzip the downloaded file.
- 3 Run Retro Duel from the extracted folder.
Only supported on Windows PC. Visit this page on a Windows computer to download and play.
Overview
Retro Duel is a couch-multiplayer duel: two players, one shrinking arena, and a weapon set that keeps fights short and decisive. The shrinking stage does most of the design work on its own: it forces confrontation instead of letting matches turn into stalling contests, which was exactly the kind of scope-aware design lesson I was looking for at this stage.
Design & mechanics
Under the hood, this project was really about fundamentals: responsive local-multiplayer input handling, simple physics and collision for melee combat, and enough variety in weapons and modes to make repeated matches feel different from each other without ballooning scope.
What I learned
Retro Duel was an engine-learning exercise, a way to get real, playable reps with GameMaker before leading a five-person team on Kittens with Cannons. Alongside Panda Quest, another small GameMaker project, it's where the instincts around scope, feel, and shipping something actually playable came from. This version is actually a reboot: it followed a couple of earlier Scratch prototypes, also called Retro Fencing and Retro Duel, that you can still play on the older game projects page.
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