Birdie and the Orbital Gear tournament

We had our first expo at Birdie, a local LAN-party here in Uppsala with about 1400 visitors annually. We set up four computers with Orbital Gear playing and as soon as the expo opened we had a bunch of visitors asking about Orbital Gear and about us. We had a steady rush of visitors the whole time.
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We also sent everyone at Birdie a Beta key for Orbital Gear, and about 10 percent of all who visited activated an account, which at least we see as a success. Walking around the different parts where people had set up their computers we saw some matches of Orbital Gear being played which made us really proud as well.
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We also presented Orbital Gear on stage, but as soon as Morbus was about to take the microphone and start talking about it, the power died for the whole stage. Eventually it was fixed, but within 45 minutes three computers had crashed and been exchanged so we decided to stop having people play on stage. Apparently the problems with the computers was something that happened throughout the whole time at Birdie.IMG_20140529_194603

Unfortunately, since there was problems with the computers, we couldn’t have the finals of the tournament on stage, but we met a production company called Unisl who helped us with sending the finals on BirdieTv, the stream that showed the finals of games such as Starcraft, Dota2 and lol. Mowhammer and Crylar where commentators of the match and the whole thing looked really professional.   We’ll make sure to upload the stream as soon as possible.

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All in all the whole thing was a success and we are really satisfied with the whole thing.

First testing done. Now for the future!

Hello everyone! Binarin here.

DLTesting

If you have been reading our blog, social media or any of our posters you know that we just had our first playtesting of Orbital Gear. We thought we would be low on testers but in the end we managed to put a tester on every computer at Dragon’s Lair.
In the morning we went to the office, we knew we had some bugs we wanted to fix before the test. We managed to fix most of the bugs we saw, then we printed the surveys for the testers and took the train to Stockholm.
We got to Dragon’s Lair, which is where we had our test. Installing the game on their computers went fine and everything seemed to work. When the testers came in we quickly noticed that the number of players on a single server was for some reason capped to 5. Kind of ironic since 5 was the most players we’ve had on a server before. It was not a big problem tho, our level was probably too small for more players. It seemed like the testers really enjoyed playing because they kept playing even when we brought sandwiches from Subway. All of the testers filled our survey, which we now have collected useful data from.
Regarding the balancing of the weapons, it quickly became obvious that Phase Orb was too strong in the current version. After we banned Phase Orb many started using Chainsaw instead. The Chainsaw might have been a bit too strong, but we think after you’ve played Orbital Gear for a while you learn how to dodge it.
Being too weak was Grenade Launcher and Chaingun, which we will take a look at.
I won’t go through all the things we learnt from the test, but it was a lot.
Once again we want to properly thank Dragon’s Lair for having us and the testers for spending time on our game and helping us out.

Now when we’re finally done with this deadline and has reached Alpha version we have to decide what comes next. For me, except for doing CEO stuff, I’ll probably work a lot on how planets and the gravity works. We will soon put together an application for Steam’s Greenlight system. When we’re on Greenlight you guys can give us thumbs up, when we have enough we will be approved to sell the game on Steam. Also, we’re looking into putting up a Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a crowd funding service where you can donate money on projects you like. If they get the amount they asked for they’ll get the money (otherwise you get your money back) and you’ll get different rewards depending on how much you donated. The reason we’re looking into it is because we want to work on Orbital Gear a bit longer to make it even better. We will have stretch goals, which means if we get up to some milestone donations we will add extra features. So I hope you understand why we’re putting up a Kickstarter.

Stay hyped!
//Binarin