In January 2019, a group of friends and I decided to make a small game for our high school independent study. After years of making countless game prototypes, we decided to make a full game that we would release on Steam. We went from having no idea what we were going to make, to having a fun to play prototype in about three weeks. Then, over the next two years of on and off work, we fleshed out and polished the game and created Orbital Contingent LLC, our game development company. The game was released July 1, 2022 on Steam.
We built the game using GameMaker Studio 2 which is a fairly simplistic, easy to use, 2D game engine, with a proprietary C-like language called GML. We used GameMaker simply because we knew how to use it and we wanted to spend our time making a game rather than learning a new engine like Unity or Godot.
My role was head of development and programming. The other members of the team contributed to the game’s design, created all of the art, wrote all of the music, and helped playtest the game.
Actual development on the game occured in small 2-3 week periods intermittently over two years, which is the reason for the incredibly long development time. This was due mostly to everyone being busy with college and other projects.
A large aspect of the project was creating Orbital Contingent LLC which was the company the game would be released under. I handled this task in its entirety, which included researching the various types of companies, filing the LLC paperwork, making a bank account, making a Steam developer account, creating the company’s name and logo, and making the company’s website.
