Orbi Universo
Pitch
Incarnate the leader of a civilization, from the Roman empire to a Chinese dynasty, make it prosper and stand the test of time.
Orbi Universo is a strategy/simulation game where you manage your civilization through an atomic approach to human society and make it evolve through the different time periods, from the Neolithic to the Modern Era.
Gameplay Video
Origin
Orbi Universo started as a 4th-grade project.
We were given complete creative freedom, and our future producer came up with the idea of using the Democracy 3 approach to create a historical management game. With a team of only 4 Designers and 1 Programmer, we targeted a Steam release.
Team
Gaétan RISCHE – Programmer​
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Martin BRUNOTTE – Producer, Game Designer
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Joffrey DELANGLE-TREFF – Game Designer, UI
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Maxence KOEGER – Game Designer, UI
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Myself, Matthieu RIBOULOT – Game Designer, System/Content Designer
What I did
Basically, I was responsible for the system itself. In a game that's based solely on it, that's a heavy burden. Our programmer developed a scripting language to give us a lot of freedom.
I started my work by researching more about the historical periods we were going to deal with. I tried to rationalize as much as possible by starting with a simplified version of the nodes and the interactions between them.
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These 2 documents were used at the beginning of the production showing these interactions as well as a technology tree to be able to rationalize our approach.
We also had a google doc that listed all the nodes used in the game, along with the main information.
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Once the design was validated, I then worked on creating the script lines to be able to test and iterate on the new nodes.
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Post-Mortem
The game required a lot of balancing and had a good back and forth process between designing and testing.
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To had acceptable replayability for the Steam release, we had to create a lot of content. I designed and scripted about 90% of the 173 nodes in the final game, allowing us to go from the dawn of the hunter-gatherers to the middle ages.
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As I write these lines, the game is finally entering the last sprint for the build to be accepted by Steam, so I couldn't really express myself on the audience's feedback on a large scale. Previous tests we did with outsiders, however, showed encouraging results. It's a project that was very meaningful for me, as it's the first time I could work on a project that was both historical and a hardcore strategy/management game, areas I'm particularly fond of. We tried to make the game ergonomic to try to avoid a repulsive interface, which is so common in the management game niche.
I did have some vision disagreements with the producer, that we resolved along the way through discussions and compromises.
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Near the end of the development, we entrusted the game to Historia Games, a French website specialized in historical games, it was the first time a journalist talked about a game that I participated in. Their opinion was mainly positive.
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Overall, I'm quite proud of the final result.
- UPDATE -
Rock Paper Shotgun talked about Orbi Universo. You can check the article here.
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- UPDATE -
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Updating this game is now currently my full time job as the game became commercially successfull.