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Orbit One Dev Diary #4: The Final Countdown
8 July 2010
With a good deal of tweaks still left to work on, plus a little more testing, I had to come up with a gameplan of sorts.
mon
Tweak overdrive
Time based - people don't notice ... intro animation
King icon for winning player
tue
P4 "joined" obviousness
Make turning more obvious
PvP overhaul
wed
Tweak spawn quantity scaling
Make everything smaller
Spawn indicators for enemies
bonus
Gravity too high close to the blackhole.
Score graphs
New name?
Listening to
Who Killed Amanda Palmer? / Amanda Palmer. I recently listened to random youtube videos and fell in love. Bought the album on a whim. Hope it’s good!
Of all the items in my gameplan, three were of great importance. I ended up writing detailed descriptions of how I solved each problem, mostly to help myself fully understand the solutions I came up with. This is as opposed to my normal method, which involves talking to myself at length.
Orbit One Dev Diary #3: Bringing Sexy Back (and Obsessive Tweakery)
29 June 2010
I spent the following week working on the visual design for Orbit One. This was quite important to me, because visual design and usability are near and dear to my heart, so I really wanted to go all out.
[9:17pm] I've got some sketches done, now I'm just trying to put it together on Inkscape and into the game.
Listening to Thunder, Lightning, Strike / The Go! Team
When I got started on Orbit One I had a very clear view of how I wanted it to look:
very minimalist art style, a bit like wipeout zone mode theme'd colour schemes, random each game maybe transition colour over the time of the game BOLD typography players: cyan, magenta, yellow, white pickups round, enemies angular, powerups???
Not all of that made it in, but the basics (clean lines, smooth curves, bold typography and minimalism) are definitely evident in the final product. A variety of colour schemes and transitioning colours would have been cool, but there just wasn’t time.
Orbit One Dev Diary #2: Down with the Sickness
21 June 2010
Things were going so well, and then it all ground to a hault. My body, it seems, had enough.
[1:47pm] So that "headache" turned out to be the flu.Was out of action for a couple of days, doing nothing but sleeping, watching TV, and playing Plants vs. Zombies. Really, it was a lot worse than I make it sound. Getting back to work slowly now ... I'm just going to try and get the menu-game transitions working properly.
Listening to
Something that won’t give me a headache: Give Up / The Postal Service
Orbit One released
17 June 2010
Orbit One is finally out on Xbox Live Indie Games. Grab some friends, grab some controllers, huddle around the TV, and have a blast! 
Orbit One Dev Diary #1: Frantic Coding
GAMMA IV was a series of convenient events for me. When Kokoromi announced GAMMA IV, I had little in the way of time-sensitive work, so I made a mental note, “Sure, I should do this.” Then they announced it would take place at GDC 2010, and the mental note got upgraded to, “Clear my schedule, we’re doing this!” But what really sold me on GAMMA IV was the theme: a game that works with only one button (per player) for input. No direction pad, no analog stick, just the A button. My design tends to gravitate toward minimalism, so this was right up my alley.
I spent many an idle moment thinking about what I wanted to make. The themes of flight and a circular arena were the ones that stuck. Notes were taken. Doodles were, err, doodled. I had a solid ten days off from work, and an RROD’d Xbox. How convenient.
One of the initial doodles for Orbit One.
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