About
HOW WE ARE GOING TO SHAKE UP THE GAMING INDUSTRY
Spiral Studios intends to bring the fun and excitement back to the action genre, by focusing on its core values: intuitive gameplay, tight controls, frustration-free designs, and competitive, skill-based challenge. These elements are found in some games; sometimes a game incorporates a few of them. Rarely will you find a game that focuses on every aspect of a “fun” game, and those that do are the games that players still come back to decades after they were made. We hope to stay true to these values by introducing our flagship studio title: Orion.
Orion is a fast-paced, first person shooter with a heavy emphasis on team-based, multiplayer play. The game itself is set on an alien world that is similar in nearly every way to our earth in prehistoric times. The development of this game gives us as a team the wonderful opportunity to focus on what we view as the core of action genre gameplay.
We want the player to know exactly what to do and how to play without ever having to be told how to do it. This is accomplished by the best games that rely on intuitive design to make control schemes, map layouts, item and weapon functions, and special abilities. We incorporate a jetpack in the game, for instance, for what we call the “assault class.” The jetpack mechanic is rarely seen in modern games, yet our players have been able to use it easily and with great success; even players that have never tried our game have had no trouble using it. We incorporate this ease of use into all of our classes, weapons, items, and abilities.
Ease of use should not imply that the players will master a skill the first time they use it. The skill sets that we include for each class can be improved through practice and frequent use, allowing more advanced players to employ maneuvers that novice players cannot. That jetpack mentioned earlier? Sure you can use it easily straight out of the box, but nothing will beat the feeling of reward you get when you take down an enemy player before you even touch ground. We design all of our mechanics with the mindset that player skill, practice, and ingenuity should be rewarded.
A successful game cannot rely simply on fun, and interesting mechanics; it must also be built with basic human psychology in mind. We make it a core value to design our game to be as free from frustration as possible. Frustration is the antithesis of fun. Nothing kills a great game like unresponsive controls, environments or items that don’t behave in ways we expect, or design layouts that confuse or hamper a player’s ability to play well. That is why we have made it our goal to make Orion as fast and fluid as possible, without sacrificing an ounce of playability.
WHY WE WILL SUCCEED
Spiral Studios is here to serve our fans. We like to keep them in the loop, with news and updates tailor made to pique their curiosity and arouse their interest. We love talking to our fans and we understand that they are the engine that keeps us developing with such energy.
Our flagship game, Orion, is at its heart a community-driven game. We’ve taken the extra effort to ensure that our fans needs are met, their wants are satisfied, and their questions are answered. Our team is talented and we’re confident that we can make a great game, but when it comes down to it, we serve the players, and we strive to include the content that we know they’ll love.
We are gamers that wish to deliver the one thing that any gamer wants more than anything: a fun game. Everyone wants to make a fun game, there’s nothing unique about that. You could argue that a game isn’t a game unless it’s fun.
So what makes us different? We strive to make our games fun. We love to make our games fun. Fun is our CORE value. We want an un-diluted, un-frustrating, un-complicated, fast-paced, care-free, competitive gaming experience. We value an intuitive experience where a player can sit down for the first time and implicitly understand how to play. We strive for challenge that isn’t artificially added, or worse, brought about by poor gameplay mechanics or frustrating player control. We care about a beautiful visual experience, and we understand the excitement that can be derived from a titillating cinema-quality adventure, but without that fun gameplay, you’d be better off watching a movie.
We’re a team that has played games, loved games, and understand games. We study the fundamentals of design, and we attempt to better understand abstract concepts like “fun.” We know that any group of passionate gamers can attempt to make a game, but if they don’t understand the basics of what makes a game easy to control and fun to play, they are doomed to fail or at best, fade to mediocrity.
It’s the studio that has a solid foundation of disciplined self-education and self-improvement, as well as a firm grasp of player psychology, and above all else, a commitment to a quality experience that will rise to greatness. To make it to the top, it takes years of blood, sweat, and tears, and there is never any guarantee of success. To succeed in this industry is tantamount to climbing to the top of Mt. Everest, and it’s about as likely to happen. We know we’re nowhere close to the top of that mountain yet, but we’re confident that there are few who are as eager and willing to climb it as we are.
