Arkin News

Welcome to the first official update for Arkin! As you may have gathered from the title, this post is about our new name and the reasons for the change. We’ve also released a new trailer that blends a bit of story and some exciting gameplay.



We’re sure this will be the biggest question so we’ll jump right into it. First, a bit of background is needed.

When development on Project Orion started over two years ago the name was simply a placeholder. It was a code name of sorts, which many games have when they start development. However, as time went on we grew fond of the name, and when it came time to decide on an official one we quickly agreed to stick with Project Orion.

Project Orion served the game well throughout our college years and beyond. It wasn’t a perfect name; it did not have great search engine results (the NASA nuclear propulsion project of the same name being primarily to blame), and there were a couple games out there with similar names. It was one of those games that really forced us to make the decision to change the name. Recentlythis game garnered significant media and community attention, and regardless of what the proverb says, there is such thing as bad publicity. Especially when people begin mistaking your game for the one getting all the bad press.

With the indie game market being so crowded we couldn’t afford to have people dismiss our game out of hand as “that game with all those problems”. Indie games rely heavily on word of mouth for visibility and community building; having a name that is already tainted in people’s minds just isn’t an option.





For those who haven’t read too much about the game (or had a chance to play the Alpha) the name might be a bit of a mystery. Just like Project Orion, Arkin has serious significance in the game’s story.

The Arkin are a race of hostile aliens seemingly intent on destroying every trace of humanity in the galaxy. Their motivations are completely unknown. Even the nature of their race is unknown; are they organic, machine, or something entirely different? Do they function as individuals, or as a hivemind? As the pilot of the Orion, the only ship even remotely close to the technological level of the Arkin, you and your battlegroup are the the sword and shield of humanity in this new conflict.



To accompany the name change we’ve been working hard to prepare a new gameplay trailer. Having been several months since we last released a video we’re very excited to show you how much has changed. Its short and sweet, and we hope you find it as awesome as we wanted it to be!

https://youtu.be/lkroXTI-rtg



We will be releasing a new dev blog in the next few days. It will be a bit shorter than normal due to the work that has gone into the rebranding but we still have some interesting updates for you. We also expect to be releasing the new Alpha 0.3.4 build to our testers shortly. We’ve just got a few things to wrap up before we can take care of some final testing and get it out the door.

As always if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, let us know! You can reach us through our official forum, Steam, Facebook, Twitter, or email. Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next time!

- The Arkin Team

Welcome to the first official update for Arkin! As you may have gathered from the title, this post is about our new name and the reasons for the change. We’ve also released a new trailer that blends a bit of story and some exciting gameplay.



We’re sure this will be the biggest question so we’ll jump right into it. First, a bit of background is needed.

When development on Project Orion started over two years ago the name was simply a placeholder. It was a code name of sorts, which many games have when they start development. However, as time went on we grew fond of the name, and when it came time to decide on an official one we quickly agreed to stick with Project Orion.

Project Orion served the game well throughout our college years and beyond. It wasn’t a perfect name; it did not have great search engine results (the NASA nuclear propulsion project of the same name being primarily to blame), and there were a couple games out there with similar names. It was one of those games that really forced us to make the decision to change the name. Recentlythis game garnered significant media and community attention, and regardless of what the proverb says, there is such thing as bad publicity. Especially when people begin mistaking your game for the one getting all the bad press.

With the indie game market being so crowded we couldn’t afford to have people dismiss our game out of hand as “that game with all those problems”. Indie games rely heavily on word of mouth for visibility and community building; having a name that is already tainted in people’s minds just isn’t an option.





For those who haven’t read too much about the game (or had a chance to play the Alpha) the name might be a bit of a mystery. Just like Project Orion, Arkin has serious significance in the game’s story.

The Arkin are a race of hostile aliens seemingly intent on destroying every trace of humanity in the galaxy. Their motivations are completely unknown. Even the nature of their race is unknown; are they organic, machine, or something entirely different? Do they function as individuals, or as a hivemind? As the pilot of the Orion, the only ship even remotely close to the technological level of the Arkin, you and your battlegroup are the the sword and shield of humanity in this new conflict.



To accompany the name change we’ve been working hard to prepare a new gameplay trailer. Having been several months since we last released a video we’re very excited to show you how much has changed. Its short and sweet, and we hope you find it as awesome as we wanted it to be!

https://youtu.be/lkroXTI-rtg



We will be releasing a new dev blog in the next few days. It will be a bit shorter than normal due to the work that has gone into the rebranding but we still have some interesting updates for you. We also expect to be releasing the new Alpha 0.3.4 build to our testers shortly. We’ve just got a few things to wrap up before we can take care of some final testing and get it out the door.

As always if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, let us know! You can reach us through our official forum, Steam, Facebook, Twitter, or email. Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you next time!

- The Arkin Team

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Project Orion dev blog! This month we’ve been hard at work on missions as well as a new flight and combat tutorial. The art team has been working on the updated Orion, as well as other assets both big and small. Let’s get to it!



In our last dev blog, we showed you a very grey and very much work-in-progress version of the new Orion. This month it’s quite a bit less grey. In fact, it looks absolutely amazing (and I can say that objectively, since I’m not the artist).

At this stage the modeling and texture work is nearly 100% complete. Any changes beyond this point will be minor, typically to fix UV or texture issues in hard to see places that can easily be missed. We expect to have the new Orion in the next Alpha release.


The new Orion isn’t the only thing to come out of the art department this month (if you can call three people a department), we’ve also got a brand new OSA ship ready for combat. The ship you see below is an Outer Systems Alliance Crusader-class frigate. Coming in at 273m long it’s a very serious piece of military hardware.


Finally, we’ve got another work-in-progress model ready to show, and that’s the new space elevator for one of our early missions. This is part of a complete redesign of a mission that, to put it bluntly, sucked. We’re confident that we’ve learned from our mistakes and the revised mission will be as fun as we imagine it will be.




Something that came to our attention this month while working on the next Alpha update was that our testers might have a hard time playing the game. Why? Because we don’t actually teach them how. Yes, we forgot the tutorial. We figure that not having a tutorial is something that can be overlooked pretty easily when you’re the developer of a game because you forget that not everyone has played it for many, many, many, hours.



Explanations (or excuses) aside, we’re working to rectify this issue by providing a comprehensive flight and combat training mission. Keeping to the trend of disguising the tutorial as part of the game world, you are on one of the final test flights for the Orion before it is deemed fit for combat. You’ll run though all the basic flight systems before moving onto shields and weapons, and finally some drone combat. We also plan on providing a free flight mode in this area so players can practice their skills and test their loadouts away from the danger and pressure of a real mission. As with the new Orion we’re looking to have the full training mission available in the next Alpha release.



We’d like to give a quick update on the state of the Alpha testing for those not in the alpha test, or Alpha testers that missed the update. Earlier this month we released version 0.3.1 for testing. It was a fairly substantial update that included checkpoints, new sound effects, music, explosions, and a number of other improvements.

Our next update will center around the new training mission, the new Orion, and any other features that are ready to go at that time.



And that brings another dev blog to a close. One last thing to mention in case you thought we’d forgotten; the new gameplay trailer is still high on the to-do list. One of the main things we wanted featured in it was the new Orion so now that it’s almost flight-ready we’ll be getting started on the trailer very soon.

Thanks for joining us for another monthly update, and we hope to see you next time!

-The Project Orion Team

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Project Orion dev blog! This month we’ve been hard at work on missions as well as a new flight and combat tutorial. The art team has been working on the updated Orion, as well as other assets both big and small. Let’s get to it!



In our last dev blog, we showed you a very grey and very much work-in-progress version of the new Orion. This month it’s quite a bit less grey. In fact, it looks absolutely amazing (and I can say that objectively, since I’m not the artist).

At this stage the modeling and texture work is nearly 100% complete. Any changes beyond this point will be minor, typically to fix UV or texture issues in hard to see places that can easily be missed. We expect to have the new Orion in the next Alpha release.


The new Orion isn’t the only thing to come out of the art department this month (if you can call three people a department), we’ve also got a brand new OSA ship ready for combat. The ship you see below is an Outer Systems Alliance Crusader-class frigate. Coming in at 273m long it’s a very serious piece of military hardware.


Finally, we’ve got another work-in-progress model ready to show, and that’s the new space elevator for one of our early missions. This is part of a complete redesign of a mission that, to put it bluntly, sucked. We’re confident that we’ve learned from our mistakes and the revised mission will be as fun as we imagine it will be.




Something that came to our attention this month while working on the next Alpha update was that our testers might have a hard time playing the game. Why? Because we don’t actually teach them how. Yes, we forgot the tutorial. We figure that not having a tutorial is something that can be overlooked pretty easily when you’re the developer of a game because you forget that not everyone has played it for many, many, many, hours.



Explanations (or excuses) aside, we’re working to rectify this issue by providing a comprehensive flight and combat training mission. Keeping to the trend of disguising the tutorial as part of the game world, you are on one of the final test flights for the Orion before it is deemed fit for combat. You’ll run though all the basic flight systems before moving onto shields and weapons, and finally some drone combat. We also plan on providing a free flight mode in this area so players can practice their skills and test their loadouts away from the danger and pressure of a real mission. As with the new Orion we’re looking to have the full training mission available in the next Alpha release.



We’d like to give a quick update on the state of the Alpha testing for those not in the alpha test, or Alpha testers that missed the update. Earlier this month we released version 0.3.1 for testing. It was a fairly substantial update that included checkpoints, new sound effects, music, explosions, and a number of other improvements.

Our next update will center around the new training mission, the new Orion, and any other features that are ready to go at that time.



And that brings another dev blog to a close. One last thing to mention in case you thought we’d forgotten; the new gameplay trailer is still high on the to-do list. One of the main things we wanted featured in it was the new Orion so now that it’s almost flight-ready we’ll be getting started on the trailer very soon.

Thanks for joining us for another monthly update, and we hope to see you next time!

-The Project Orion Team

Welcome back to the Project Orion dev blog! The past month has been a bit slower than normal with a number of team members enjoying the last few weeks of summer with some much-needed vacation. However this month has still seen some big changes to the game and one of our most important art assets.





If you’ve seen any raw gameplay from Project Orion you may have noticed that death is not the end. Or rather, upon death you would respawn in a shiny new ship and launch back into combat as if nothing had happened. The obvious solution is to just add checkpoints, and load them when the player dies. I mean, what game doesn’t have a save system? Should be easy, right? Unfortunately not so much.

Project Orion started over two years ago as a student project with our team essentially having zero experience. So as time went on most of the original design, code, and art from those early days started to make us cringe. To fix that we’ve spent a lot of time redesigning and replacing old content to bring it up to our current standards. However some things are not easy to fix at this point, and one of them was a proper checkpoint system.



Saving in games can be done a number of ways, but at it’s core it involves saving the game state in some way that allows you to reload it with as much persistence as required. Usually the core of the game is designed with a system for this from the start and each object/unit in the world has, in some capacity, the ability to save itself at an instant. Unfortunately Project Orion was not (we were already in over our heads trying to figure out much more basic concepts at the time), making it very difficult to add such low-level functionality now, over two years later.

But that really didn’t matter, the game needed it so it had to be done. As of this month we’re very happy to say goodbye to respawning and hello to death! Yes, death, the thing that brings significance to survival. We can’t emphasize enough how much this changes how the game feels – it makes everything matter. This is especially significant from a story perspective. Checkpoints give you the chance to learn from your mistakes and make real progress, instead of just grinding away, respawning until you eventually move forward.



The Orion is a very important part of the game (hint – it’s in the name), so we want to make sure it’s exactly what we envisioned when we began. To that end we completely redesigned the ship several months ago and the result was fantastic.

So, a few weeks ago we said let’s finalize the design and move on; make any final tweaks and that would be that. The artist responsible for the Orion to this to heart and made a few more significant changes than we expected, to put it mildly. Not all surprises are bad however, so here it is – the new Orion!


Of course this is still a work in progress, but we really wanted to give a preview of what’s to come. It’s less bulky and more streamlined, giving it the appearance of speed and maneuverability to match its capabilities.



The alpha testing is ongoing, however we haven’t released an update in some time. The reason for this is the new checkpoint system and the complete rework required for it to integrate into existing missions. We’ve been working through existing content, in some cases significantly modifying events in missions to better suit the checkpoint level flow. Once we’re confident everything is once again playable and working well we will release version 0.4 for testing.

In short, everything was very broken, it’s almost fixed now, and there will be a big update once it’s completely fixed.





And that’s all for August! As they say it’s not quantity but quality that counts, and the updates this past month are big in quality. A final note on that new gameplay trailer we keep mentioning – it is coming. It takes quite a bit of time to assemble enough quality footage and edit it together well so we want to make it worthwhile by having as much new content in as possible.

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you next month!

-The Project Orion Team