Orbitals, an endeavor several years in the making for developer Shapefarm and publisher Kepler Interactive, bills itself as an anime you can play. Set 15 years after a storm shut off their settlement from the world, the co-op only adventure follows Maki and Omura–who have been best friends since childhood–as they set off into space on a journey to save their people.
When game director Jakob Lundgren first joined forces with creative director Marcos Ramos on Orbitals, their team consisted of just six people. Now, that number has grown to about 50, and the game looks much different from how it originally began.
“It was top-down, and it had these little robots running around doing menial tasks around the ship,” Ramos explains. “Then, at some point, I said, ‘This is cool, but what if anime?’ And that little robot became Maki.” Everyone on the team connected with her right away, which showed they were heading in the right direction.
For a while, Maki was the star of the show. “Originally, the game was not actually co-op only. You could either play it [solo] or with two people,” Ramos says. “Maki was the main character, and we had this robot supporting character. But even when we made it co-op only, [the robot] very much felt like player two, which is something we definitely didn’t want–in a co-op game, you should both be the main characters.”
That’s where Omura, Maki’s partner, entered the picture, and he took even more time to perfectly nail down. The team wanted the classic anime dynamic of a hero and their complementary foil, comparing it to relationships like Goku and Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z, which led to many Omura iterations. “I think there’s even a sketch where Omura was a dragon,” Ramos says with a laugh. “I don’t know if I ever showed that to you.”
Much of the design behind both characters was about finding the right clothing and hairstyles that represented their personalities, while also having to contend with keeping an authentic ’80s aesthetic. “For example,” Ramos says, “in modern anime, there’s a huge space between the nose and the mouth. But in the ’80s, they were all [gesturing right under his nose] here. If you look at Sailor Moon, she’s got a little mouth up here. And that was a learning experience for us, trying to understand the style very well.”
These initial evolutions also came from the team’s desire to truly find out what the voice of the game needed to be. “I think earlier iterations focused more on the cool,” Lundgren says, “but then we started putting in a lot more charming stuff, and it became this nice mix of both serious topics [and] a lot of silly and lighthearted moments that can just make you smile as you see them. And at this point, we can say, ‘We need to make it more Orbitals-y,’ and people understand what it means.”
A team destined to make a game like Orbitals
“I’m a super strong believer that you can’t deny who you are,” Ramos says. “We could start working on a chess game tomorrow, and I think in a couple of months, it will still become a co-op anime adventure. Because you make decisions every day, little decisions that you don’t realize, but you’re pushing the game in the direction of the things that you care about.”
This predestination Ramos speaks of was arguably inevitable with the team assembled at Shapefarm. Lundgren previously served as a level designer at Hazelight Studios, the developer behind co-op-only titles like A Way Out and It Takes Two, and Ramos worked on two anime game adaptations, Naruto to Boruto: Shinobi Striker and Samurai Jack: Battle Through Time. The lessons they both learned working on their respective projects have now been collectively poured into Orbitals.
Lundgren was at Hazelight from the very beginning and says much of the experience of making A Way Out had to be done somewhat blindly, as there weren’t really other games within the genre to reference. By the time they started making It Takes Two, they’d figured out much more about co-op, particularly what makes interesting gameplay and how to get people to communicate. ” A lot of those learnings are things that have been there from day one on Orbitals,” he says.
That same experience in the co-op genre led them to craft Orbitals as enjoyable to all skill levels, balancing an accessible experience for beginners with enough challenge for seasoned players–an equilibrium that Lundgren says is very difficult to achieve, requiring constant playtesting. “As soon as something is playable, we test it on people in the office who haven’t heard of the idea before, so they’re seeing it for the first time, then pretty much as soon as possible, we try to get external play testing as well,” he says. “Then it’s just a lot of balancing, a lot of tweaking the numbers and finding where, pretty much regardless of experience, you can still have fun with it.”
For Ramos, his lessons were more art-related. “When you make a drawing in 2D, it looks great, and you’re super excited about it, and then you make a 3D model out of that, and it doesn’t work at all, or it only works for a certain camera angle, but then you rotate, and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, the ponytail doesn’t work.'” When the team began working on Orbitals, the devs were prepared for those problems when they arose after developing solutions in Naruto and Samurai Jack. “Samurai Jack’s ponytail actually changes shape and location depending on the camera,” he continues. “We have a bunch of those little cheats that we got from experience.”
Anime inspirations and selective authenticity
When it comes to the specific anime that the creative team was looking to, Ramos immediately credits the original Dragon Ball series as a huge inspiration, expressing admiration for the sense of freedom and fun its creator, Akita Toriyama, possessed. “There are rules to the world. Especially later in the story, he became like, ‘Oh, there’s this deep lore to this thing.’ But at the beginning, it was like, ‘I feel this would be fun: A pig that can turn into whatever he wants for five minutes and kidnaps girls,'” Ramos says, laughing.
Inspiration goes far beyond a singular series, though, assistant art director Johannes Varmedal explains. “It’s a wide mix of different anime references and inspirations that we put together on our art board when we defined the art direction for the game. But for me personally, I love Venus Wars, Wings of Honneamise; Akira is an amazing movie,” he says, emphasizing his love for their beautiful handpainted backgrounds. For the animation of characters, Varmedal points to Ramos’ love of older ’80s anime shows, like Sailor Moon and Bubblegum Crisis, as a big inspiration.
Alongside the aforementioned art board, Ramos also possesses what Lundgren calls a folder of “like a billion” reference images, an endless treasure trove filled with lasers, explosions, and other imagination-sparking gifs. “We’ll be talking about a gameplay mechanic or something,” Lundgren says, “and he’ll be like, ‘I have something for that,’ and I see him clicking through GIFs.”
A small but important distinction about Orbitals is that the team didn’t just want the game to be reminiscent of ’80s anime; rather, it’s inspired by the feeling of watching those shows as a child. In order to capture that magic, they had to pick and choose where they’d be faithful to classic anime, and where they’d deviate. “There’s a bunch of things that we went through,” Ramos says. “Like audio–all the sounds were very compressed back in the day, and everything was super saturated. We tried that, and it didn’t feel right.”
“Even though technically it would be more authentic or more similar, sometimes you look back at stuff and, in your mind, it looks so different,” Lundgren adds, emphasizing that their goal is not to create something incredibly authentic. “We’re not trying to be something that we cannot be, we’re making something that is inspired by what we love. At the end of the day, it is very anime, but at the same time it very much is our experience of it.”
“We always speak about the right amount of cheese with the project,” Ramos says. “We don’t want to be cliche and feel like we are making fun or being very shallow or making a kind of parody, yet we don’t want to be too cool and modern where it’s like, ‘Now I have all this technology, I can do it way better.’ It’s the right amount of cheese.”
Even though they aren’t striving for total accuracy, the team has a lot of rules they adhere to when it comes to both the aesthetic and story of Orbitals. Nothing is fully angular, for example. “It’s almost like you’ve inflated objects and they’re ballooning out a bit,” Varmedal explains, “and there’s a limitation in how we use colors so that we don’t use too much textural detail–we want to keep it very painterly and stylized.”
“The art is very, very, very strict. There’s this huge PDF with all the little things, like, ‘We don’t do wrinkles like that,'” Ramos says. “With the narrative, we had the rules, but they were more like guidelines: what are the archetypal–not stereotypical, more like archetypal–stories that are told in anime? Simple plots, making it character-first, that was it.”
From there, they had to adjust the script’s language, particularly the Japanese version. “The way Maki speaks is very ’80s girl anime protagonist,” Ramos says, and getting that just right involved a lot of meetings with external consultants. “We wanted to make a love letter to this thing,” he continues, “and we wanted to do it respectfully.”
Collaboration with Studio Massket
The team always dreamt of having traditional hand-drawn animation for Orbitals’ cutscenes in the game, and after speaking to many different animation studios, the team landed on Studio Massket as the right fit, as they were very excited about the idea of an anime you can play. Though Massket has worked on a myriad of big projects like Attack on Titan and One Punch Man, the studio didn’t have a lot of experience with games, which necessitated working out the kinks of two very different pipelines.
“Games and anime are very, very, very different,” Ramos says, “but we got it working, and we ended up sharing knowledge and assets. A lot of the stuff that they made, you can see in the game, like beautiful 2D paintings; conversely, a lot of the environments and assets we made, you can see in the cut scenes.”
When the collaboration first began, Ramos and the team already had some set things for the game, like character concepts and lore. “We had a narrative already,” explains operations manager Megumi Varmedal, “so we gave a bunch of stuff to Massket’s cutscene director [Hidetoshi Yoshida]. He’s really amazing–he was working on anime in the ’90s and ’80s, so he’s really a legend,” adding that Yoshida’s understanding of the time period made him the ideal pick for making something inspired by ‘80s anime.
The rationale behind the team’s decision to partner with an animation studio in the first place was multifaceted: it was a conscious decision first to save time and money, but also to give a very consistent look throughout. “I think this is a personal pet peeve of mine, but I don’t super enjoy games that feel very different when they go from gameplay to a cutscene–it’s kind of jarring. The characters feel like they speak differently, like they move differently, so we’re very conscious from the get-go to marry the two as much as possible.”
Because the default version of Unreal Engine is much more tailored to realistic-looking graphics, getting the Orbitals aesthetic to come through on Shapefarm’s end has been no easy feat. “We’re doing a lot of, perhaps in terms of Unreal Engine, unconventional things,” Johannes Varmedal says, “things that took quite a while to iterate on in order to find the rendering pipeline we now have in the game. We needed to make our own backend for it to support the art style and set up a pipeline for our arts creation.”
A passion for tiny details
It was obvious from my hands-on preview that Orbitals has immense amounts of detail on every level, and I brought up one of my favorite small finds: the difference in animations between Maki and Omura when they pick up the ship’s resident cat. Maki is much more forceful and over-excited, while Omura is gentler and more laid back, perfectly encapsulating the differences between the characters.
“The way that we work as a team is very much that we want to promote everyone to put a little bit of themselves into the game,” Lundgren says, and many of those ideas have become his favorite animations in Orbitals. “It’s stuff that not everyone will see–I think that’s also what gives those things value, because when you find these little things, and you can see like, ‘I could have just run past this,’ it gives the game a sort of soul.”
“You can’t always pinpoint what it is,” Lundgren continues, “but when you play a game like that, it just has this sort of warm feeling that’s like, ‘The devs made this thing, they enjoyed making this, and like they went that little extra mile and put those things in, but they didn’t have to put them in.'”
“I’m a firm believer that, in animation, the animators are basically actors that draw their acting rather than being in front of a camera,” Ramos adds, “and I can see so much of our animators’ personalities in those animations. That makes me happy, because I think we should shine a spotlight on the people behind the computers. It’s very common to focus on [directors] like us when we are [doing] the interview, but it’s really the whole team at the end of the day–they are putting so much value and so much love [into the game] every day.”
In fact, it’s those little details that Lundgren is most excited to see players react to once they get their hands on the game. “You mentioned the cat animation,” he says, “and I see people play it, and they find something like that, and their faces light up with a smile. It just makes me so happy seeing those sorts of reactions to things that I’m looking forward to.”
Ramos, on the other hand, is highly anticipating player reactions to Orbitals’ ending, teasing, “The whole big series of woes and twists that the story takes, how it all comes down to this very specific thing–it feels like it can only end that way, and we felt super strongly about that.”
