Introducing Orbit!

Let me be the first to introduce you to Orbit! Being the latest creation from the depths of my mind, I’m partly entitled to say this is my favorite. The task was to create all the graphics through Flash’s graphic class, so everything in the game (apart from the text) is generated through code. It was a nice little challenge to have as little going on graphically, but still be able to distinguish between elements while playing.

While creating this, I had mobile in mind even though the size doesn’t match up. Swiping up and down feels so much better than just pushing an arrow key. It’s a more natural gesture, and matches more to what the player does in the game. Speaking of which, gameplay consists of orbiting around three rings, avoiding the red dots, collecting green, and only collecting blue if needed. The player (the big gold dot in the picture above) can switch between the three rings, and gets a point for every green dot collected. If he collides with a red dot, he loses a life (and shrinks to a third of his size). The blue dots, when the player hits them, restore all of the player’s health, but subtract five points from their score. It adds a nice little layer of depth - at times you want to avoid them, and at others you really need them.

There are different spawn patterns based on the player’s score, and I feel there’s a good ramp-up in difficulty. I had Super Hexagon in mind when creating this - start hard, get harder. I feel I hit the nail on the head, although I feel there could be one more difficulty past the last one currently (the game levels out after the player reaches 80). Something new I added that isn’t in my previous prototypes is high-score tracking. It was super simple, and I’m really itching to see how else I can use it in future projects. Save states are definitely a possibility.

As with the rest of my prototypes, this is still on the “I might come back to” shelf. Although I feel it can be a little repetitive, I do really like the gameplay, and can so easily see it on my phone. We’ll see if that ever pans out. Give it a whirl here!