Simple, entertaining games for phone, PC, tablet and console
Our Mission
Create simple and entertaining games for a wide audience and have fun along the way.
At Cabin Orange we develop games using C# and the Unity game engine. It is easy to learn the basics rapidly, but powerful enough to produce triple A results. It’s also cross-platform.
I’ve created a few basic proof of concepts, followed a lot of tutorials, read a lot of whitepapers and websites and I’ve centred around Unity and C#. For the past year I’ve concentrated on a single game and, although it’s not finished, it’s looking pretty good so far.
I’ve tried not to bite off more than I can chew, I’m starting simple. It’s a very basic 2D space shooter for phones. Lot’s of tutorials like to use the space shooter as a starter project and I’m no different. It’s not going to have networking or a multiplayer element to it. It’s just a basic and (hopefully) fun shooter for the person who has ten minutes to spare.
I’ve got plenty of imaginative but realistically achievable ideas for future games but this one has to be finished first!
The game was started in May 2018 after many tutorials and attempts at vastly more complicated games. The first releasable game needed to be simpler to be have a realistic chance of seeing a wider audience.
The main rule broken is in doing all the art assets. It’s time consuming but part of the creative experience that needed to be pursued. Open source sound and music will also be replaced at some point too.
There are currently 50+ C# files and so the average lines of code per file is under 60. There are hardly any comments because the code should be small and clean enough for anyone to understand. Only 8 files breach the self imposed 100 line limit, none of those breach 200 lines of code. These files will be refactored before release.
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The goal is to release the first game before the end of 2019. There’s a lot to do to have a minimum game but the aim after that it to continue to develop the game based on user feedback, reviews and my own stretch goals. The intention, at this point, it to release the game to the Android platform for free.
When development of the game first started, everything was basic looking and open source art assets were used quite a lot. Our own 2D (Photoshop and Affinity Designer) versions of player and ship assets were created. As each art asset has been replaced over the past year our original 2D “hand drawn” assets are looking dated and not matching the aesthetics of the rest of the game. These are now being replaced with Blender models low poly assets that are then turned into 2D for use in the final product.
Although the first game has been developed with efficient resource management in mind, we have been careful not to over optimise to early. Simple resource management patterns such as Object Pooling have been started but need to be implemented throughout the game.
Currently, there are only two levels to the game. It was more important to make sure that all the relevant critical parts to the game existed before creating too many levels. Creating levels takes time and a fundamental change to the game code can break all the levels. The implementation has reached the point that other levels are now being thought about properly but with the view of making sure that most of the code is in place.
Some play testing has been completed as the development of the game has progressed. Play testing is difficult. It takes time to simply observe someone playing your game. It’s a frustrating experience to watch someone not understand something that seems obvious to you as the developer. If they do not understand something, it’s because you didn’t make it clear enough. The game is reaching the point where independent play testing is going to be increasingly important.
Are you an artist, developer, sound engineer, musician or can you help in other ways. Cabin Orange are looking for helpful volunteers.
Interested in what Cabin Orange are doing? Think you can help out? Do you have an issue with a game we have released? Please contact us.
