Hello from the team behind Orbitals

Hello! こんにちは！

We’ve been absolutely delighted by the warm response we’ve received from everyone about our upcoming game, Orbitals. It’s truly heartwarming to see so many of you taking the time to get in touch and show your support for what we’re creating.

With that in mind, we thought it’d be nice to introduce ourselves a bit!

Megumi Varmedal

- Operations Manager

Hi, I'm Megumi, Operations Manager at Shapefarm, and also a producer for the 2D cutscenes, theme song recordings and the Japanese voice recordings for Orbitals.

Working on Orbitals with the team has been a super fun journey.

Even though modern anime is made digitally now, we worked together to reach back into those classic 80s and early 90s techniques - choosing emotion and expression over perfect linework and consistency.

Since we are hard at work currently getting ready for release, I'm excited to look ahead to launch this Summer when we can hopefully play Orbitals together!

Marcos Ramos

- Creative Director

Hi, my name is Marcos and I’m the Creative Director of Orbitals. My responsibilities involve coming up with and executing on the creative vision for the project.

Throughout the dev process and to this day, whichever decision we make always comes down to “how does this reinforce being a retro anime experience for two?”

I have a bit of a “tradigital” workflow. Lots of the writing and concepting I do starts on pencil, pen and paper. In the early stages I like to keep it as free flowing and low tech as possible, with anything that can potentially be distracting taken out of the way.

From that point on, I move to digital, usually doing backgrounds in Rebelle, characters in Procreate, 2D animations and VFX in Blender, videos in Resolve and story scripts in FadeIn.

I’m extremely excited to get the game into people’s hands. I want to hear your stories, from how you successfully (or painfully) solved a puzzle together to what you think about the characters. I’ll take a week off of work to go through all your stories.

Jakob Lundgren

- Game Director

Hi! My name is Jakob and I'm the Game Director of Orbitals. My job includes playing the game a ton and providing feedback on every element, making sure everything comes together to create a cohesive and fun experience.

For as long as I can remember, I've been wanting to make games. Back in my childhood days, career counsellors used to tell me that it was an exciting dream, but that I should rather focus on something a bit more realistic. Now I've spent the last decade exclusively making co-op games.

I love the idea of sharing a well-crafted, self-contained gaming experience together with someone. Seeing two people laugh and connect over the games I make is something I'm sure I'll never grow tired of.

During my teenage years I started getting into anime and Japanese culture, then one day I found myself in a café overlooking a bustling Tokyo street while planning the early stages of Orbitals, smiling as I thought about how excited 13-year-old me would have been if he could see where I was today.

With Orbitals being the first game I'm the Game Director of, it's been an incredibly challenging and nerve-wracking experience. Seeing the overwhelmingly positive response to the few bits we've shown has been an incredible experience. Currently my focus is on utilizing the remaining time to make sure once the game comes out, it's the best version it could possibly be!

Isamu Ogawa

- Sound Designer

Hello! My name is Isamu, and I'm a sound designer. I mainly work on creating and implementing sound using Wwise and Unreal Engine. It's an honor to be part of this project.

As a sound designer, creating anime-style sounds was a fascinating experience. We researched old interviews and materials to gather information on how those iconic vintage anime sounds were created. Then we tried to recreate them within the game.

It was a fun yet challenging task. As we neared the end of production, we improved a lot and learned how to make the world feel more anime-like through sound.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how everyone reacts to the game, the art, the sound, the music and everything!

Johannes Varmedal

- Associate Art Director

I’m Johannes and I have the privilege of managing our Environment and Technical Art team.

The world we’re shaping has a lot of character, and new ideas tend to surface naturally as we work together solving design challenges.

Much of our focus in art is on shape language, balancing detail levels and colors to achieve a painterly, physical hand-crafted 2D look despite being fully 3D.

Seeing the positive reactions to the art has been very motivating as we continue development. It’s great to see the things we love and enjoy creating resonate with others!

Currently working on ensuring that our gamma correction works regardless of display. Coincidentally, Orbitals looks even more retro on this old LCD TV!

Hugo Sanchez Westberg

- Game Designer

Hey hi, my name is Hugo and I'm a game designer on Orbitals. I've been in the games industry for roughly 8 years, I am Swedish but live in Japan, and I enjoy walking up and down mountains.

Being a designer at Shapefarm is very hands-on. We work in Unreal Engine which allows us to create full mechanics and prototypes.

Our approach is usually to make something we think is cool as quickly as possible and then snatch two other developers, throw controllers in their hands, and see if they have fun with it.

What makes Orbitals special for me as a developer is the approach to gameplay. Variety and novelty are the main drivers and we try to reuse as little as possible when going into a new area.

I've been working on Orbitals for a long time, and I hope you think it's kinda fun.

Taliesan Arnold

- Lead Animator

I'm Tal, when I was 13, I dreamt of being an anime animator in Tokyo. It was the reason I started my journey into animation as a career - and 20 years later, thanks to this game, that dream came to fruition.

I'm the Lead animator for Orbitals. I was responsible for creating a style that translates 2D anime animation into a cohesive look that is both faithful to the roots of anime, whilst retaining a good gameplay feel.

Orbitals has been a wonderful challenge, as a lifelong anime fan, I really wanted to capture the kinetic spirit of the roots of this medium.

When I started this project, I took it upon myself to dive deep into the source of the 80s era and fell absolutely in love with the creativity and passion of these pioneers and tried to deconstruct how they approached animation, and find a way to apply it to a modern 3D animation context and into a video game.

There's a bunch of cute easter eggs in this game, I hope fans of anime will catch, small winks to the community to connect with fans of this medium and hopefully bring a sense of nostalgia.