O.R.B: Off-World Resource Base - Development

Development

According to game designer Phil O'Connor, O·R·B was designed to take a different approach on the RTS genre, emphasizing the "strategy" therein.

The storyline also received significant attention, as the developers wanted to move away from the rehashed alien stories in other space simulation games. Instead, the player is made to be "unsympathetic" to one side, the Malus. The Malus are thus portrayed as a clan-based society where the strongest rule over the others. This makes them set in their beliefs, and thus excessive violence is the focus of their campaign against the Alyssians, whom they view as inferior. The Alyssians, in contrast, are a society of thinkers and scientists, open to meeting new people and unaccustomed to war. Nevertheless, when it becomes obvious that reasoning with the Malus will not work, they quickly adapt to the situation.

Each ship in O·R·B was designed with a specific purpose, rather than simply having a ship for the sake of it. Ships also act differently depending on what they're engaging. Weapons in the game were also designed to be used strategically: the capital ship-mounted beam weapons will be universally effective, whereas blaster-equipped fighters will have trouble dispatching anything much bigger than another fighter.

To further emphasize careful planning, many activities in O·R·B take several steps to perform. Mining an asteroid requires scanning it, building a resource base to install a mine, and then waiting for freighters to transport the material back to the player's base. Maps were designed to take several minutes to cross. With the enemy base commonly on the opposite end of the map, this was done to make the player commit to an action, and likewise make going back on that decision difficult if it goes bad. Phillipe Charron composed the music for O.R.B.