Roto Force is Not an Arcade Shooter, Says Dev, But the Sequel Might Be

gamerant.com:

The independent game developer, Accidently Awesome, built its first commercial game over years of intermittent development. Roto Force started as a game jam entry in 2016 and grew gradually to become Anton Klinger's first-ever full-fledged game title. However, the development brought along troubles that the then-student couldn't have foreseen.

The game's origin as a ten-day stint to enter a game jam competition affected the entire years-long production thereafter. This also meant that Roto Force wouldn't outgrow its roots, for better or for worse. It started as a Game Boy jam entry and was awarded 12th place for Overall Gameplay under its initial name, Pixel Soldier. The game evolved drastically after the competition but had its ups and downs. Game Rant talked to Klinger about Roto Force's genre-combining gameplay and issues in development.

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Klinger went through a change of programming platforms before starting the development of his first commercial game. The choice to create Pixel Soldier with Java sprung from familiarity with the programming language and new tools. The tools, including game library libGDX, helped him achieve goals faster. After all, the initial product had to be finished in just over a week.

This made Accidently Awesome's one-man coding team more effective but resulted in other issues later in the development. Many of them weren't considered when entering a community competition with a tight deadline. While Java was a very versatile language and supported by many platforms, Klinger realized game consoles do not have Java runtime. This meant that the game couldn't be released for consoles unless ported to a different language as