The environment design more or less forced the Defender environment loop into the game. Incidentally, this is why the game is constantly suggested to be a Defender clone when it was never intended or designed to be one. It is a self contained game location with no start and no end and could become a character unto itself. The environment being a loop would also mean that travelling in one direction for too long would put you back where you started, which was ideal. The player would then be looking down the curvature of the ring, seeing more than they would otherwise if the environment was flat or curved inward. While 16:9 is great it still isn't wide enough to capture such panoramic perspective, so my solution was to use the ring I had designed and flip it so it faced outward. This quickly led me to thinking about the deluxe arcade version of Darius with its three screens showed you enemies from quite far away. I thought that I could make a similar game but in a side perspective and using a looped environment. While that game was visually 3d with primarily 2d gameplay, it was also top down and with finite level sizes. If you haven't played it, it was very much an old school, possibly Williams inspired, shmup with a modern take on controls and action.
I'd been a fan of Pom Pom's Astro Tripper on PC and loved how the ship controlled and flipped around on a direction change. Not being one to waste artwork, I took this original 3d model and tried to figure out a way of using it another way. Originally, the sections that made up the design faced inward as opposed to outward and visually it was take on Halo and Killzone architecture, with strong 45 degree support struts, panels, and built in lights. The model was a half circle outer space sports stadium for a whole other game concept I had been playing around with, one that would have been too complicated to follow through on.
The idea for what I wanted to create came from looking at a piece of artwork that I had modelled quite a long time ago that later became the basis for the Orbitron Ring. My plan was to complete a game on the visual and design front and then find a partner to do the programming, having an established core to work from. I left Capcom Vancouver in November 2010, with the goal that I could finally play a part in building something, anything, of my own design. I had always wanted to get a small game of my own design off the ground and unfortunately was not given the opportunity at any of the larger studios I had worked for. Over the next 14 years I worked on a myriad of projects and ended up completing work as cinematics director on Dead Rising 2 at Blue Castle Games, later Capcom Vancouver.
I had been working in video games since October 1996, starting at Radical Entertainment.
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