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.

Time based - people don't notice
    every minute alert. even then, it didn't catch my eye. so i
    added a little ripple effect behind it. not too distracting,
    but it gets your attention. the critical point is that it
    comes on at the start. that sets the stage, you know?

King icon for winning player
    didn't quite go with "king" but every-so-often I show the
    ranks above the player. wanted to keep the cut-throat
    competition that i saw during tests going even more! 
    hope to see alliances and stuff form out of this. like,
    "OMG x is winning ... everyone gang up on x", etc.

PvP overhaul
    surprised at how much vitriol was dealt out wrt the pvp
    collision system. I think the underlying system was fair, but
    there wasn't any feedback to prove it ... the game goes very
    fast. i can understand this too ... it's how i feel about
    FPSs (OMG, how'd he kill me?, etc). so i added a
    "chalk border" effect. better still, the killer has little
    waves which show "right, this is how it happened".

    After it was implemented, i noticed the pvp *was* actually a
    bit unfair. sorted that out by making the bounding boxes
    tighter, and adding a couple of rules.

Oh God, Amanda Palmer is amazing!

I worked on the problems quickly, my deadline was the Wednesday, when I had two new testers ready to try out my game. Finding out whether they picked up on the cues was my top priority.

Listening to  (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? / Oasis

Testing went reasonably well. My testers picked up on all the cues I hoped they would. So in that sense, it was a success. On the other hand, despite kind words, they weren’t enthralled with the game. Sometimes, that’s just the kind of thing you just have to deal with.

It was around this time I added one of my favourite features to Orbit One: a score graph! I love it when games keep track of a long list of pointless stats. I’ve always wanted to take those stats and make a crazy series of graphs and charts. I didn’t have the time to go completely nuts, but the score graph was a step in that direction.

There wasn’t much left to do at this point. I was pretty much pleased with the game at this point, as is reflected by the change logs being filled with tiny tweaks:

- made score fx more obvious by adding a slight scaling effect,
  and fading it slower
- PvP kill gets two points
- added timeout to postgame screen
- draw postgame player huds in rank order
- the first spawn of a game is always good
- player hud includes rank
- enemies are always drawn over pickups

Like I said, mostly tweaky/polish stuff at this point. The PvP score increase was a big change though. There were two nagging issues remaining. The first was to name the damn thing! Yes, believe it or not, ten days before its release Orbit One was still not called Orbit One. The other issue was with the visual feedback on turning the ship.

I hate naming things. In rare instances, a name will come to me almost immediately. More often though, I’m left deliberating over a name for longer than I’d care to admit. Orbit One was much of the latter. The project name was (and still is) OneButton, which was never going to be the real title. For a while, I used the name Circuit Bender, as the arena was a circuit and ship was “bending” its way around it, as well as a play on the term “circuit bending”. Yes, lame, I know. My friends were quick to vito the name.

I then started doodling out terms related to the game, including, but not limited to: circuit, rush, blitz, bolt, thrust, bowl, tail, orbit, stream, one, circle, and concentric. There was more.

But the words “Orbit” and “One” were in there, and they seemed to make a good match. And that’s how Orbit One was named.

On turning the ship, here’s what I had to write:

I have one other thing I want to try. And that's making player
turning more obvious. I did a quick test where the ship scaled on
the x-axis as it turned (as if it were doing a roll) and that was
useful for feedback. It wasn't shaded, which didn't make the
effect look great. I'm going to do some renders and try that out,
hopefully it'll be good. It's the one mechanism that isn't
visually explained in-game.

Listening to  Who Killed Amanda Palmer? / Amanda Palmer. Obsessively.

A couple of days later, on January 24th, it was all over.

[10:33pm] Final touches today. "Orbit One" is the final name,
bar any last minute inspiration. A nice logo designed as well.
Implementing an idea I was on the fence about, but now totally
love. When you're about the turn, the ship faux-rotates, giving
you a natural visual indication. One of the annoyances right now
is that you can sometimes flip without knowing it's going to
happen. The animation should go some way to helping with that.

Listening to  In Rainbows / Radiohead

The logo ended up changing before the release, as blogged about. Honestly, the old logo wasn’t great, but in what can only be called “graphic design fatigue” I just resigned myself to the idea that the logo was fine.

The ship rotation thing was a nice last-minute change too. Getting that last nagging flaw in the game fixed was very rewarding.

The game was submitted to GAMMA IV on January 27th, a couple of days before the deadline. After the GAMMA IV deadline, I was rather tired of looking at Orbit One and left it alone for a month or so. I came back to it in March and polished it up for the Windows/Xbox release, leaving the gameplay itself alone, and just tweaking the menus, aesthetics, etc.

Orbit One wasn’t selected to be shown at GAMMA IV, and yeah, that was a bit disappointing, but the winning games are stunning and definitely deserved to win. I don’t regret a thing as I’m quite proud of what I’ve done with Orbit One. It isn’t quite as expansive or feature-filled as my previous games, but it’s a wonderful little game in it’s own right.

It was a great change of pace too, as this diary is a testament to. Game coding is never more frantic than with a tight deadline in place. Working on Orbit One renewed my sense of wonder in game development. For all you developers burned out from working on your epic title, take a break, just a month, and write a small game. You’ll remember why you love game development again.