Dev Blog

Snippets, teasers and behind the scene peeks at games in the development process.

Fusion Shift: Game Design Objectives

1 June 2012
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In this post I’m going to write an overview of what Fusion Shift’s gameplay entails and what we at Orbital Games have attempted in preparation for its first public release. Please note that we are still developing Fusion Shift and it is currently in a pre-Alpha stage, so there will be quite a few changes prior to [...]

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Fusion Shift: Development History

19 April 2012
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Fusion Shift was started as our very first project, almost 4 years ago before we had even formed Orbital Games. I was learning to program games and had created a (very) simple 2D scrolling shooter. With some ‘basic’ graphics from Charlie, we evolved the simple prototype into a game concept. Unfortunately, as I was still [...]

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Pew Pew Puzzle Lasers: Introduction

9 January 2012
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Pew Pew Puzzle Lasers is a 2D puzzle game where the player must guide coloured lasers to the corresponding coloured target. There are several blocks on each level, some pre-placed and some are placed by the player. These blocks have different effects on the lasers and must be placed, rotated and used together to bounce [...]

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The Cloud Runner: Development Announced

23 December 2011
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Another of Orbital Games’ projects, The Cloud Runner (temporary title) has been revealed. While still in the early concept phase we are interested in everyone’s impressions of the game and as always encourage community to contribute to the development. We we will be featuring all aspects of development via both our official site as well [...]

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Pew Pew Puzzle Lasers: Development Announced

25 November 2011
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Orbital Games is delighted to announce our latest title “Pew Pew Puzzle Lasers”. This game has only been in development for 24 hours and already we have nice stable tech-demo, user interface, working menus and even a level editor. Alpha will be released to the public next week, giving us time to make a fair few test [...]

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Octopede: Thoughts on the Control System

7 November 2011
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Hi, Octopede has received mostly very positive feedback, which has encouraged us at Orbital Games to keep at this game development lark. One of the major criticisms of Octopede was the control system. If the control system were a bit different, perhaps the Indie Mine Review of Octopede  would have been  all positive, instead of just [...]

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Domination Tower Defence: Lighting Effect

30 October 2011
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Graphics programming isn’t normally necessary for 2D games, but if you are willing to get down and dirty in the HLSL and draw your scene with a few rendertargets, you can add some very advanced and customizable post-render effects. One of the ‘simplest’ effects is the bloom lighting effect, which is used is nearly every [...]

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Domination Tower Defence: Update

18 October 2011
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Hey, I’ve been mostly doing some more DTD Development over the passed few days. Much of the work has been on the engine, and so sadly there isn’t much to show – though it will make future developments much faster! The main visible change is the new 2D particle engine I made. I’ve done particles [...]

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Domination Tower Defence: Development Announced

14 October 2011
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‘Lo all, You may have noticed that the PC version of Octopede was pushed live on Desura yesterday (http://www.desura.com/games/octopede), and the Xbox 360 version will be coming very soon! At Orbital, we definitely consider our key skill to be making games (that is, programming, art and sound) so we try to ensure that we always [...]

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XNA: Useful C# Helper Methods – Create Texture2D

5 October 2011
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Hi all, Part of being a programmer is reusing code, and not ‘reinventing the wheel’. Any half-decent game programmer should have a library of useful, generic functions which can be used across all games (and even other programs). I’ll be posting some of my useful methods – feel free to use them yourself or to [...]

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