Orbit: The Idea That Followed Me Home

Somewhere Between the Trees, the Screen, and the Endless Sky

Orbit didn’t begin with a design document, a market analysis, or a clever plan to make a mobile game. It began one night in a forest. A forest, or rather, a place that’s been spinning around in my head every day for the last two months or so.

The Idea That Followed Me Home

At some point that night, I stopped being entirely sure where the forest ended and everything else began. The trees, the music, the sky, and even myself started feeling like parts of the same thing. Time wasn't making much sense either. I remember being convinced that I'd somehow reached the end of it.

Eventually, the forest became a forest again. The music became music. I was still alive for some reason, which was useful - otherwise the game and the company wouldn't be around today. But something had shifted. For months, my friends and I had talked about making games, building apps, and creating something that belonged to us. We had the skills. We had plenty of ideas. What we didn’t have was urgency... That night gave me urgency.

So I came home after a very long and unforgettable weekend, sat down, did as much research as I could, and then I gathered my friends. I told them that we should finally do this properly. So we went ahead and we registered a company. I won’t go into too much detail here, as we already covered it in our previous blog How Splendid Forge Began: 8 Friends Making Indie Games.

Forging Orbit

Some days feel like twenty-hour sessions. The forest has been replaced by a digital world where instead of trees we’re surrounded by digital tools, unfinished menus, broken builds, and bugs that somehow disappear when somebody else looks at the screen.

Orbit began as just a fleeting thought in my head while I was lying in a hay field, looking at the endless sky in which I could actually see the end of time.

Turning that image into a real game has been much less mystical. Most of it looks like moving something by three pixels, testing it, moving it back, and wondering why the first version suddenly looked better. Still, the feeling behind it has remained the same.

Orbit is the first proof that the strange promise I made to myself that night wasn’t completely insane.

We are actually making games now.

What Orbit Actually Is

The game is made of a simple core mechanic:

• You control your main character by just tapping. That's it. One tap. Reverse. Don’t die. Tap again.
• You try to survive by going back and forth around an evil sun, dodging rockets, lasers, tentacles, meteors and comets.
• Random buffs spawn along the way: slow motion, bonus points, hats that give you an extra life (up to three), and temporary invulnerability.
• Runs are short, usually somewhere between 1 and 5 minutes.
• It's designed to make you laugh, get angry, and compete with your friends (and players around the world).

Still in Orbit

I don’t know whether one strange night can change a person’s life. I just know that this one changed what I did the next morning and every day from that point onwards. Orbit is almost finished now. It has gone through broken prototypes, visual experiments, mechanical changes, and more late nights than I should admit.

Soon, other people will be able to play it.

They won’t know where the idea came from. They won’t see the forest, the fractals, or the two strange, Egyptian god-like figures I saw watching over it. They certainly won't know what it felt like to be convinced I'd died that night.

And I don't expect them to.

But I hope that some small part of what I felt that night makes its way into the game. The strange feeling of being connected to every human, every animal, every cell and the universe itself. If Orbit makes them relax for a few minutes, lose themselves in its movement, feel a bit of happiness, a bit of anger, and connect with someone else over a ridiculous high score, then maybe I've managed to pass on a little of what I felt that night.