Finally finished implementing the leaderboards for Orbital Decay. Play, record your score, carve your name in the hall of fame! 
Been a wild ride forging this with CodeIgniter, php, sql, RESTful, haxe/as3-to-REST communication, integrating into my own custom arcade…happy this works as expected.
(oh yeah, and report any bugs you might find)
Originally posted in the Kongregate forums here. I find it intriguing that someone would spend so much time writing about a piece of shit game (Orbital Decay) he so much hated. Oh well. Internet is a curious place
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Two of them and rather…obscure. They are closely related to one easter egg in Fallout 3.
Yeah, who would have thought one can actually find a place to hide easter eggs in that game?
Please find them and return them to me 
Nothing related to that Orbital Decay, but funny stuff nonetheless
Public stats for Orbital Decay are available here.
Stats are for game impressions: one Mochibot ping before the game is loaded/initialized.
The game was also licensed to Armor Games, where it got 300k+ plays and an unknown number of plays at Big Fish Games (but probably around 100k). All in all, 2.5 million game plays for a game that scored 3.75 at Kongregate, 4.15 at Newgrounds and 7 point something at Armor Games and received overall mixed feelings of awe and anger
Jayisgames reviewed it and their readers voted it in the top 10 browser shooters of 2009, while later on, the reviewer, Josh, remember it as:
the “battleship” premise is unique and under-utilized in this genre, sporadically popping up in occasional gems like Orbital Decay.
Our players said that it sucked badly enough that it deserved a lengthy bash or that it ruled and is the best game evar. No compromises, love it or hate it. Just as I intended to
…or how to make the graphics (when you’re not an artist).
I planned Orbital Decay as a solo enterprise and making the graphics took most of the time: out of the 5 months it took for the project to finish, 3.5 were allocated for the graphics. I opted out for a retro-pixel art-”16 bit graphics” style, as a homage to that gaming era and because I wanted total control for the details on the assets, a thing pixel art is good at for this small resolution (e.g. ports, turrets, hatches, etc).
For each ship, I followed, more or less, a routine: researching for a design (this included the general shape and the details, big and small), 3D modeled the shape and the rough details with Truespace, rendering a side view of the ship, then start editing at the pixel-level in Photoshop. The whole process usually took about a couple of days to a week, intricate ships like the Radiant Star or the Aru Destroyer took even more.
Here’s how this worked, in visually comprehensive but not exhaustive way:
Perspective View
Making of, frame by frame
…or both?
It’s possible to start working on an add-on for Orbital Decay, somewhere in the near future, so I’m considering various features to include. One would be a mission editor for every creative player to fiddle with, where you’ll be able to create a new campaign and share it with the others. The other option would be a new campaign, with an alternate story line/ending. I’d pretty much like to do both, but I only plan to allocate about one month for this…
So, what will it be?
This is the first post in a series that will detail various stages of the development of Orbital Decay. I felt “postmortem” sounds ugly or maybe way too common, and since this is the unusual blog, things are getting done a bit differently than in the gaming industry
This part will detail the idea and the sources that influenced the design of Orbital Decay.
Some players complained that the story moved too fast and I somehow feel they are right. At least for the non-native English speakers, reading the story and shooting down baddies was probably a not-so very pleasant experience. Later on, a while after the release, I had the brilliant idea to add a “log” button that would enable to see all the past messages…but it was too late, the game had already spread on portals.
So, here’s the story transcript, in case you missed something or you simply want to live the adventure of Radiant Star once again.
The story is release under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.
