Indie Innovation Spotlight – Orbz

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 22, 2012

This week’s spotlight is on another indie game that is a personal favorite of mine, an older title that I encountered early in my own discoveries of the whole “indie scene” (that term still cracks me up).

I discovered this game while knee-deep in the development of  Void War. I’d made the mistake of not taking a serious look at what the newly-dubbed “indie games” (the term “shareware” was still popular then) community had to offer.

My first forays into indie games didn’t impress me. I encountered a lot of amateurish, half-finished junk out there (still a problem with indie games). But then I found some truly excellent titles that made me excited about the indies. These games were professional, polished, and a lot of fun to play. Orbz was one of them, and quickly became a favorite. It also showed me that innovation doesn’t necessarily come from adding new ideas, but sometimes from stripping a well-known concept down into it’s most basic parts and going wild with unencumbered simplicity. I think it deserves a lot of the credit for turning me into an “indie evangelist.”

Orbz – by 21-6 productions

What Is It?
“Be the ball!” was the advertising slogan for Orbz when it was released circa 2002. It took the basic premise of most ball games – throwing or launching a ball and hitting a target – and made that the core of the game. Rather than playing  someone doing the hitting, throwing, or kicking a ball around, Orbz abstracts that aspect out to a simple 3D game where the ball itself is the player character.

You launch yourself into the air, hitting targets, ricocheting off of barriers and targets, and hitting power-ups to change your behavior. You can only control your ball only when it is at rest on the ground (or, sometimes, under water). Much like golf, you must play yourself “where you lay.” Good play requires not only accurate shots against high-value targets, but also making sure you that you bounce off and land in a reasonable spot to make another shot, so you can  maximize the bonus for consecutive hits and avoid wasting a shot (and time) to reposition yourself.

You also compete against other balls. These may be AI-controlled, or can be against human players on a server. Your task is to score the most points possible within a given time, though other balls may be consuming targets and forcing changes in your plans and pattern. Each level is themed, providing some variety to the world. And there’s a nice array of canned taunts to send your human opponents.

This isn’t a game you’ll play in hours-long marathons, but it’s a great “casual” game for just playing a quick 5-minute level or three for a break in the day.

What Makes It Stand Out?
Orbz focuses on the purity of launching a projectile. And that is a lot of fun. Gravity and environmental conditions are a factor. It’s kinda like a game of miniature golf mixed with HORSE (a basketball practice game, for those who don’t know) with a time limit and power-ups. While at rest, you simply focus on aiming and the force of your shot. While it doesn’t sound like much, it’s actually a lot of fun.

What really works for me is the stripping down of gameplay into it’s simplest form, and then really maximizing the fun factor of these simplest elements. In this case, it’s aiming and shooting with appropriate force in a race against the clock. All the other game elements go back to serve this basic mechanic.

Aiming and launching yourself with appropriate force to hit near and medium-range targets is actually a pretty easy skill to master, even at speed. But planning your targets so that you can have a continuous, high-scoring run, angling yourself just right so you’ll bounce and roll to a useful location after the hit, sometimes working out a double-scoring hit or extreme long-range shots, taking best advantage of the power-ups, and competing with the other human or virtual players is where things get tricky. But all these things are simply advanced uses of the same, straightforward skill.

The game is a good lesson in indie game design, IMO. With a simple scope, it was reasonable for a small team to develop and polish in a short period of time. As I understand, it did pretty well commercially as well. I’d probably do a lot better as an indie if I remembered its example.

Other Notes

I probably owe this game a lot. In addition to being one of the games that got me excited about the potential of the indie games scene, it may also be a significant reason why – good or bad – my most recent game, Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, was created with the Torque Game Engine. Not that my game has any similarity to Orbz from a gameplay perspective, but it made me take a serious look at the engine.

Unfortunately, Orbz seems to be one of the victims of my oft-predicted DRM doom of games. I’m sad that it had to happen to an indie game. My installation code no longer seems to work for some reason, and contacting the publisher (GarageGames) about the problem yielded no response. So if you’d like to try it, you’ll be limited to the 60-minute demo – unless somehow new purchase codes work while the old ones do not.  But it’ll be a fun sixty minutes!

Filed Under: Indie Innovation Spotlight - Comments: 12 Comments to Read



top