Every two weeks we release a Dev Blog giving an update on what we’ve been working on with orbYorb, along with any notable news.

Hey everyone!

It’s been a seriously busy two weeks for us since our last update. We’ve spent a lot of time this week going through a lot of planning and concept design so we can start to properly nail down some of the core theme to the game. What you see right now in our Alpha Demo is quite abstract, and while the core feel of the gameplay won’t change, our plans for the general theme are quite different to what is there at the moment. We’re still keeping a lot of this under wraps until it becomes more concrete, but we’re quite excited about how our vision of the game is developing.

At the same time, we also submitted an application to the UK Games Fund Round 4 this week. We’re not holding our expectations too high about our chances of success, however getting a grant from the UK Games Fund would make a massive difference to helping us achieve our goals for orbYorb this year as we plan to launch into Early Access.

orbYorb v0.2.6 Released

Dev Zone

We’ve added a new item to the Main menu called Dev Zone. This is a small test area of the game where we build and test out combinations of mechanics.

Nearly every mechanic in orbYorb can be chained together somehow, so a Switch can activate a Door, but that Door could also activate a Target Switch, and that might turn on an Elevator. These are all fairly simple at the moment but having a super extensible system will allow us quite a bit of freedom in designing the proper levels in future.

As we add and test new mechanics we’ll usually add them to the Dev Zone first, so if you’re interested in an early preview of things that may or may not go into the game, feel free to check it out.

Full patch notes

• Added DevZone to the Main Menu.
• Added Target Switches which can only be activated with the Orb.
• Added Push Block which is moved by hitting Target Switches attached to it.
• Fixed velocity of Orb when restarting the game, so the Orb doesn’t go flying off at the start of the game.

That’s it for this Dev Blog, we’ll see you in two weeks!