Arkin News

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

It’s time for another dev blog! This past month has seen the start of alpha testing, lots of new weapons and attachments, and so much more. Read on for all the details.





We’re happy to announce that Alpha testing for Project Orion has officially begun! We released our first test build through Steam last week, with a follow-up build just this past Friday. We’ve already received some great feedback from our testers that will really help improve the game.

Alpha testing will be a long-term process as we continue to release updates in the coming months to test new features, missions, and bug fixes. There is no NDA involved with the alpha, so our testers are free to discuss their experiences, post videos, or even stream the game.



One of the downsides of being an independent studio is our budget constraints. In most cases it means we have to create more of our own content for the game, rather than relying on help from outside parties. In this case we’re talking about music.



Usually a game studio would have a composer and sometimes even a whole orchestra or group of musicians to help them create a score that works with the game to help deliver a great experience for the player. Unfortunately, our team doesn’t include an in house musician or composer, nor do we have the money to hire one on contract. This means in order to score our game we need to find suitable pre-existing tracks that we can pay a more modest fee to license for our uses. While there is a lot of great music out there for use, it can be difficult to find what we’re looking for. It’s time consuming just to listen through the hundreds of tracks that may or may not be what we need. Sometimes even after finding a great track that really fits beautifully with Project Orion we find that the way it’s been composed doesn’t lend itself to implementation in game, either because it can’t be made to loop through gameplay sections with an indefinite amount of time or because the overall sound palette interferes with the gameplay sound too much.

All of this means that finding the right music for Project Orion has proved difficult to say the least. However, we have made some good progress over the past few weeks in finding some more suitable assets that should be making their way into the game soon, it’s just a matter of taking our time and making sure everything sounds the best it possibly can with the resources available to us.



As we mentioned last month the art team has been very busy working on new weapons and attachments for the Orion. Working so hard in fact that they’ve created five new weapons and seven attachments, with more in-progress! Here are a few of them in-game:



As usual there is lots more being worked on behind the scenes as well. Progress continues on the Outer Systems Alliance fleet, we’re starting on the hangar for the Orion, and the Orion itself is getting another update to better support various attachments and modifications.



The past month has marked many changes throughout the codebase as we worked on getting the alpha released and continued developing new missions. Working on new missions always leads to changes throughout the project as improvements and new features are added to accomplish the various goals we have for the missions we’re working on.

One of the missions we’ve been spending a lot of time on has very high requirements for the AI. This new unit needs to be fast, agile, and very quick to adapt to changes in the level. Thankfully our AI system was designed to make creating unique units easier by reusing different behaviors. By removing some behaviors specific to the base fighter and tweaking the parameters on other behaviors we we’re able to get a working prototype of our new specialized unit in just a few minutes. From there we can work on creating new behaviors that handle the extra logic we need from our custom unit.



We’ve also spent some time implementing a graphics technique called GPU Instancing in order to boost performance. The basic concept behind instancing is instead of telling the GPU to draw one unit, then the next, and the next, and so on, we simply say draw all of these things in one go because they all look the same. This works great for things like debris, particles, and projectiles. While we haven’t started really optimizing the game yet, this feature was just too good to delay.



Thanks for joining us for this month’s Dev Blog! And a special thank you to all those of you who have been playing our Alpha builds and continuing to provide us with the feedback we need to improve the Project Orion experience. As always we’ll have more updates next month when you can look forward to hearing about our progress on new missions, new models, and more.

-The Project Orion Team

Welcome back to the Project Orion dev blog! It’s been a busy month and we’ve made an incredible amount of progress on many fronts. We’ve got news for Alpha testers, updates from the art team, and more information on how we’re working to make the customization and gameplay balanced and rewarding.





After a long wait, we’re finally prepared to start our alpha testing in earnest. One of the final steps was deciding the best way for our testers to get access to the latest updates and fixes as we finish them. We realized the easiest way to do that is to take advantage of being Greenlit and release them directly through Steam! We’ll be in contact with our alpha testers in the coming weeks with more details on the process and how to access the Project Orion alpha on Steam.



As part of preparing for Steam distribution of test builds, we’ve also released our Steam store page! This marks a big internal milestone for us as it shows just how far we’ve come. It’s been a long road, and there is still plenty of work ahead, but the feeling that comes from hitting these milestones really is one of the most rewarding parts of the development process. Along with this we’ve also updated all the screenshots in our Media page, and a new gameplay trailer is in the works.



As usual there is plenty of activity on the art front. We’ve got several ships in different states of development, one of which we’ve featured below. The Arckin Heavy Bomber fills the role of an intermediate range ship capable of doing significant damage to large and well-armored targets. While being slow and large makes it an easy target, it is heavily armored and boasts twin turrets to harass attacking fighters. That, coupled with the fact that they are never seen without a fighter escort, makes them a significant threat on the battlefield.



Along with new ships, we’re also hard at work on designing and creating the visual component to all the weapons and attachments for the Orion. This is a large and long-running task, as the sheer number of attachments for the Orion means creating unique and interesting designs for each one of them is not an easy thing to do. Despite that we’ve been making good progress and we’re looking forward to showing you plenty of new weapons in the coming months.



Continuing from last month’s focus on customization, this month weapons have been a big part of the design and engineering workload.

One of the bigger changes we’ve decided on for this month relates to aim assist. Originally the game had no aim assist whatsoever, and while that was OK for players who had experience with flight and shooters in general, others found it very difficult to even hit their targets. To help newer players we introduced a limited form of aim assist that was tied to difficulty. We were never fully happy with that solution from a realism point of view so we’ve decided to change it.

Going forward, aim assist will be different for each individual weapon. Essentially some weapons will be gimbal mounted, others will be fixed. Some may only have the ability to move and track targets when energy is routed to weapon systems. Weapons that are fixed will have the disadvantage offset by higher damage outputs or fire rates, with gimbal mounted versions becoming available only in higher unlock tiers. In this way more skilled players are rewarded with more destructive weapons, and newer players still have the assistance necessary to enjoy the game. Also on harder difficulties the gimballed weapons may not provide the damage output required to quickly dispatch enemies, making fixed weapons more of a necessity.





This month we’ve been focusing on tuning the Orion’s weapons and abilities. This is a difficult task, and there are a lot of weapons and abilities that don’t feel quite right just yet. The process is fairly straightforward, but involves a lot of testing and trial and error.

For example, with weapons we start out with goal based on what we want the weapon to feel like. For example, the Orion’s Railgun is a hard hitting medium to long range weapon that rewards players for their skill and precision. Once the base implementation is ready and usable in-game the tuning process begins. It’s a cycle that starts with tweaking the weapon’s stats so that it performs in a way that we think is good, then we test in-game and see how it actually performs, and based on that information we start the cycle over again. We want to make each weapon feel unique and to have their own personality so ultimately they will be rewarding and fun to use.



Thanks for reading this months dev blog! For our Alpha testers, stay tuned over the next few week for details on how to get access to the game. For everyone else, we’re working on a new gameplay trailer that we home to release soon. See you all next month!

-The Project Orion Team