Quietly Improving Orbitfall
It has been nearly five months since the last update on Orbitfall, but that does not mean we haven’t been making progress. In fact, there has been a lot of work on the game these last few months, just quietly behind the scenes.
Our initial playtesting in the spring was hugely beneficial, and I cannot thank people enough for trying out the game and sharing their feedback. It was immensely helpful in identifying areas that Orbitfall needed to address. Orbitfall presents unique design challenges. It has three resources to manage: stars, crew, and ships. This combination of needs has been challenging to balance. We expanded the hand to 9. We added recalibration at the start. We tried a rule that backfilled the hand to five. We kept needing specific cards and combos, which made it very difficult for people to achieve consistent success.
We addressed this by removing the stars from the main deck and placing them on their own deck. This reduced the card types to two, making room for enough ships, crew, and specialty tech and protocol cards to give you the tools to execute your battle plan. Now you turn over one star per turn (unless a card says otherwise). Even with this change, the star system remains a strength of the game. Various energy levels, decay, and the introduction of unique Celestial Stars add variety and drama to the star resource itself. So, despite turning over 1 Star card each turn, there is still interest and variety among the stars.
We have made changes in other areas of the game as well, including a new playstyle pyramid that introduces a rock-paper-scissors dynamic common in classic strategy games. We have updated the factions, including their playstyles, to reflect these changes, and they have been tuned to maximize their strategic lens. I will share more on these changes in another update, but you can read more about them on the Playstyles page of the website.
Finally, I have been working with artists around the world to bring the look and feel of Orbitfall to life. Each artist will take a faction and create a full set of card illustrations for that faction, preserving its look and feel in the game. You can check this out on the Artists page of the website. We have some incredible talent lined up to work on Orbitfall, and I am honored and humbled that they have joined the team.
A new set of cards has been printed and is on its way, so playtesting will resume very soon. I look forward to sharing more about Orbitfall and its progression with you over the coming weeks. If you are interested in staying updated, please sign up for the email newsletter to receive updates as they become available.
