Early Days
When I first joined the project, It was just me, Riley (project lead and company founder), And Robert (producer and general manager) for a pretty significant chunk of time. I was still very green, I’d just wrapped up my first game development job with a small dev from Germany and had maybe a year and some change of professional experience. Even then the idea of a small team making a VRMMORPG seemed crazy, but I was happy to be working. I was initially treating it like comission work but it very quickly became clear that they were looking for someone to establish the aesthetic vision for the project from the ground up, and were willing to be very hands-off about it, which was both thrilling and incredibly overwhelming for me.
Below are some of the earliest sketches from Orbus. A lot of what I did at that point didn’t make it into the game, as I was still exploring and feeling out how I wanted this world to look while also managing my own time and skill limitations as an artist, keeping in mind that I would be soloing the asset production workload for the forseeable future.
After a while, I started to lean into this weird muppet-esque, hyper cartoony style as that felt like it would be the most achievable for a project of this scale. I’d started to get bits and pieces of lore refs and was ready to dive into designing the world in earnest. There were loads of technical challenges to solve at this point as well, like how to efficiently produce a ton of gear and npc models on an insanely tight time budget. I had zero reservations about anything at this point and would pitch the weirdest stuff and more often than not get the OK. At one point I wrote a pitch where all the player and NPC models would be puppets. That was definitely a non-starter. Volume of content was a huge focus back then, so I was absolutely churning out enemy and gear designs.
I think it was around this point that the team started expanding. We got a second artist, which freed me up a bit to take care of planning and conceptual stuff a bit more instead of just grinding asset production non-stop. There was a bit of game design and technical problem solving mixed in with the visual design I was doing, although I don’t think we really ended up using many of these ideas. This was honestly probably for the best since my game design chops were near-zero at this point, but it definitely lit a fire in me that’s still going strong today. Nowadays I consider myself primarily a game designer, and an artist in service to that.
Now that the team was starting to grow and we were getting some community buzz, we’d do a kickstarter which would effectively serve as the transition point from the more meandering and exploratory pre-alpha development to the very focused lead-up to launch. I was definitely feeling very in-my-element at this point, and the rest of the team seemed to be happy with what I was doing, which emboldened me to take bigger swings. We’d start to see lots of evidence of that as we got closer to launch, as well as the in-world lore really starting to take shape with the hiring of a dedicated writer.
