Orbon

Orbon is a collaborative game development learning project with my 6 yr old son Oscar.
(You can read more about his game based learning adventures here: http://www.coplay.ninja/ )

Orbon ™ is an endless play experience designed to test your thinking and reactions, that requires focused concentration and timing.
It’s currently in open alpha testing phase on Google Play, coming soon to iOS.
https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.sonicviz.orbon
App page: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sonicviz.orbon

Technology: Unity
Team: Me and my 6 year old son as co-designer
Process: It started out as a small project I put together to test some Affective AI plugins I was evaluating for client projects. Affective AI is software that responds to the users emotional state through different sensors and emotive state pattern detection.

While testing these out I thought of a side project to do some game development with my son, to show him a little of the process of development and engage him in some high level design and play testing. We talk a lot doing that so it’s great for his english skills too;-)

The goal was to develop something fun but quickly with high quality art, music, and sound. We developed the core mechanic first (the toy) then built some gameplay around it with a little story backdrop. Art style I was originally looking to do something quite abstract but we took a U-turn into the current style instead. I spent a bit of time choosing the music and sound FX as this is a key part of the experience as well.

I heavily leveraged the Unity Asset store for some key subsystems and art, most of which I already had. It was very much an iterative process to explore what might work, then implement and test. Total project length was ~4 weeks.

It’s quite a complex little game under the hood. I surfaced a few gnarly bugs in some of the 3rd party subsystems I used, so that involved some back and forth with the devs. Fortunately I chose packages wisely and these were all great devs who support their products really well.

I decided to release it into the wild for some early alpha testing to tune the gameplay, difficulty progression, and pacing with some more inputs from a wider audience.

Feel free to have a play and let us know your thoughts!

Skills

Posted on

August 4, 2016

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