Here There Be Dinosaurs!
Chatting About Orion: Prelude
By Rituro & Jorge Figueiredo - February 7th, 2011
“Hey Luuuucy!”
Recently, a game being developed by Spiral Game Studios hit our radar; the game is a melding of space marines, dinosaurs, mechs, and jet-packs. This awesome idea is called Orion: Prelude. David Prassel, CEO and Founder of Spiral Game Studios, was nice enough to field some questions that we sent his way. We don’t know about you folks, but this concept sounds like our childhood dreams come true*.
R: The big question: can we eventually play as the dinosaurs, Citizen Kabuto-style? I do love me the taste of Snak-Pak™ Marines in the morning.
D: In ORION: Prelude we are focused on the interaction that you have with the dinosaurs as the player. The system we have built is incredible and improving every day. The dinosaurs in ORION: Prelude react differently based on what’s at hand. They will behave differently when interacting with other dinosaurs than they would the player or vehicles, for example. The system also allows us to add independent variables, such as grouping some dinosaurs into teams so raptors work together against other dinosaurs and other players – or having a specific dinosaur prefer searching through tall grass or scouting out dead bodies. In the near future, as the game build progresses, we are going to be demonstrating our system and I believe a lot of people are going to be extremely impressed with it.
PEW! PEW! PEW!
R: The online shooter market is a crowded one; dinosaurs aside, what’s going to stop people from making the “Halo meets Tribes” comparison? Or is that a comparison you’re hoping to make?
Those are both games that did a lot of things right – and that were really inspiring to me as a gamer and a young game developer back in the day. I am actually extremely humbled when people say that. However, what’s going to allow us to stand out is not only our features, including the dinosaurs – but also the mechs, the weapon combat, the player movement, the visuals – every aspect of the game has this “charm” about it that simply comes from us loving and being so passionate about this title. On top of this, I believe our attempt at changing the industry and bettering the mentality is going to play a large part. We’ve announced FREE DLC for all versions of the game, with new content from new maps, new worlds, new game modes, new weapons, new armor and even new dinosaurs. We are also big on community interaction – we regularly play games with our fans – such as Team Fortress 2, StarCraft 2 and we are going to be playing Prelude non-stop with them as well. We will continue our “Play With Devs” event every week and also hold competitions for other aspects of ORION as well.
R: Will there be hats? /TF2Nerd
Hats were a neat addition to TF2. However, player customization isn’t a goal for ORION: Prelude. We are really focusing on the personality of each character and class. A lot of developers say that, but we truly mean it. Each class will have its own voice actor, ability, grenade type, vision mode, and weapon load-out.
J: Where did this idea come from? I have to admit, the concept sounds really awesome.
The whole premise of ORION is the dream of every young child I would say. It was just a matter of us being fortunate enough to tap into these elements and bring them together in a way that is extremely exciting.
Uh oh. Better get Maaco.
J: Team Fortress 2 seems to be doing well after a number of years; with free updates and the option to pay for in-game items (rather than waiting), they have set up a very lucrative model (especially for community members). I find it really interesting that you are going with a single cost for the main game and Free DLC. How risky is this for you?
It definitely has risk associated with it – as DLC can also act as a great way to make up poor sales on the game. However, it’s a risk that I need to take because the industry needs to change. People like Bobby Kotick are a cancer to this industry. It’s extremely upsetting to see people charging those ridiculous amounts of money for a small amount of content – and actually getting away with it. I am really pushing for Spiral to show that you don’t need to be raping your customers through DLC, but appreciating them and thanking them for even allowing to be where you are by supporting you in the first place. DLC should be a celebration of the customer – a digital thank you letter, if you will.
J: In the same line, will community members be encouraged to create levels/skins/weapons? Will they be rewarded somehow (exclusive colours, or something)?
Absolutely! This is literally one of my favorite things. When spending so much time on a game (hours on end), you sort of get lost in your own ideas. Once the game is out, it’s incredibly exciting to watch what other people do with your content and the ideas they bring to life. Not only are we excited about this – but we are going to encourage it. In our previous title, we openly included quality-driven and fitting community-made content into official releases and updates of the game. We will be doing this for Prelude as well.
Valve was extremely inspirational in this regard back with Half-Life. They really pushed for community-created content and made it accessible for gamers and aspiring developers to get their hands on tools and make new worlds. I hope to be able to be just as inspirational in that regard to at least one or two people. If I am able to do that I’d say we’ve done our job.
This is where David Prassel comes up with all of his ideas – and protects himself from Bobby Kotick.
J: How have you found the response to your call for backing?
We have a variety of publishers interested in ORION: Prelude – but we are more focused on the game build, getting the features in, the polish and all the “important stuff”. We want to retain ORION’s creative vision and we find that to be the most important piece of the puzzle right now. We are excited for when we meet the right partner and can form the right deal – as we are all investing all of our time and all of our money into this.
J: There are a lot of similarities to Halo. Are you worried about this?
No. As an overall game, Halo did quite a few things right – however that sort of dwindled as the games came out. Two things they did perfectly, in my opinion, were vehicle handling and utilizing art and color. There is no need to re-invent the wheel in that regard. Why change something that works, that’s enjoyable – just simply improve on it. So you can expect similarly-styled vehicles, the rich art and color, and the joy factor to be present in Prelude as well. There are other features that help give us our own identity, like: our advanced Dinosaur system, our jetpack elements (which are more akin to Tribes), the Mechs, and simply how everything interacts with everything else – it’s extremely exciting.
The photographer had to stand about 100m back to take this mug shot.
J: Your video is very compelling. How close are you to a working beta? How much better will the final product look?
We really appreciate that – there have been some crazy months of development recently. We have a working pre-alpha game build that we are playing internally right now. We are also on an insane deadline for GDC with what will be a much-improved game build. Everything the public has seen so far was using mostly placeholder content – including the weapons, the armor, the characters, the dinosaurs, some parts of the maps, the HUD, the user interface – almost everything.
For GDC we are putting in all of the new and official content and removing the placeholder content. This includes the new characters we have recently shown, the new dinosaurs, new maps, new weapons – and it is looking incredible!
J: Will there be cross-platform play?
There will not be any cross-platform play for ORION: Prelude – however it is something that we find extremely fascinating and have both plans and intentions of tapping into this type of feature for future titles.
