I first prototyped this little light-cycle game almost thirteen years ago. Originally written in C# with XNA for Xbox 360, and later ported to Windows Phone, it was one of the first 'from scratch' games prototypes that I really enjoyed making.

I showed the game running on my Windows Phone at an interview with a local games studio, and a couple of months later, I was working in the Games Industry, as a programmer at TickTock Games.

Since then, my family has grown (I have five children), and I've worked on dozens of games[martincaine.com] professionally. My enthusiasm and motivation for working on my own spare-time projects lessened, with only short bursts where I'd fire up the game to make changes. I made the decision to step away from XNA and rewrote the game from scratch in C++, transitioning it in to my own 'engine'. This engine has been used as a testbed to enhance my own skills and learn new platforms, porting it to run on PlayStation, Xbox, Switch, and Mobile devices. Much of the core game remained untouched while I worked on enhancing and optimising the underlying engine code.

Throughout 2024 I've made a conscious effort to work on the game weekly, usually getting a few hours work done each weekend, usually, in our local Wetherspoons (British Pub), on a quiet Sunday morning.

These dev sessions have renewed my enthusiasm and given me motivation to get the game out there for people to play. I also decided Early Access was the best fit for the game, as there's so much more I want to do with it, as well as ultimately bring the game to consoles and mobile, and plan to keep the community engaged and involved throughout development.

I knew I would be demoing the game at GaMaYo in Wakefield on November 21st, so I set this date as my Early Access release date. No matter what, the game was coming out.

So with a few days to go, I was working late in to the evenings to add a menu system in to the game, ensure all mazes were available to play, testing leaderboards, and ensuring the game flowed correctly. There are currently some small issues with Snake and Arena game modes (mainly to do with the local multiplayer for these modes), so I have removed them from the release build, but intend to work on these as a priority to get them live on Steam as quickly as possible (before the two week launch discount expires).

So, yesterday, just before 12pm, after an all morning coding session, I finally packaged a new build. Uploaded it to steam, then hit the button in the back-end to set the game live.

That's it. Positron is now available to buy, here in Steam Early Access.

We headed straight out to Wakefield after I set the game live, and set up our demo at GaMaYo. We had a great time, as it's always a good event for catching up with people, and for people to experience the game for the first time too.

Updates to the game will be coming this weekend, and I plan to update frequently, as well as post a roadmap and todo list for development and game changes or enhancements.

If you have any feedback, I'd love to hear it either here on our Steam forums, or on our Discord channel: https://discord.com/invite/9AKEqcrbY3


Thanks for taking an interest in Positron, and I look forward to working with the community to develop it further :-)

Martin Caine
Retroburn

The time has finally come to release Positron here on Steam.

We're bringing Positron to Steam Early Access (Tomorrow!), as there's so much more we want to do with the game, and we'd love to get feedback from the community and help shape the future of Positron collaboratively with the community.

Development of the game over the years has been slow (and many times completely stalled for a few years, due to lack of time to work on it, and lack of motivation). We've been making time for regular weekly dev sessions throughout 2024, just a couple of hours here or there, but it has been enough to improve the core game, the renderer, the game flow, and create hundreds more levels.

The Early Access release will feature the Maze game mode at first. It's the most polished game mode, and is primarily leaderboard driven. Complete the maze, and set a time on the leaderboard. Try again, with a faster bike, to try and set a top score on the leaderboard, or, continue on through almost 100 levels which get progressively more difficult.

Snake mode will come soon after Early Access release. We have some tweaks to make to this game mode but it's working well. It also features leaderboards for the most collected orbs (which grow your trail, which you must avoid). There are a series of Snake levels to play, which begin to introduce more complex layouts and obstacles making it trickier to play.

Arena mode will come next to the released game, and we plan to get it in the game before out two week launch discount runs out. This will add dozens of arena levels of varying complexity to be played vs computer controller opponents. Up to 16 bikes can compete in the Arena, in a deathmatch format. You score by getting other bikes to crash in to your trail, and the highest score you set will also be set as your overall Arena leaderboard score for that level too.

Split-screen modes will come next. Arena supports vs split-screen with up to four local players. Snake supports vs splitscreen for up to 4 players too, with the last bike-standing being declared the winner. Maze mode will support vs splitscreen, but on procedurally generated mazes, with players receiving a rank based on the order in which they complete the maze.

Much of this intended additional content is already very functional and working in our local development build, but isn't ready for public release. We plan to spend all of our spare time over the next two weeks finishing this content and getting it in the live game, with regular updates coming every few days.

We will also be publishing a full roadmap of our future plans for the game, and will review this regularly when considering community feedback and involvement in the development process.

We hope you enjoy the game and highly encourage players to leave a review if you do enjoy the game.

If you have any feedback at all, our Discord is the best place to contact us: https://discord.com/invite/9AKEqcrbY3


Thanks for taking an interest in our little game :-)

-Martin