A Behind the Scenes chat with LeGingerDev about All Hail the Orb

All Hail the Orb is a pixel-art incremental clicker with lots and lots of ducks that was published on Steam last April 20 and has performed very well (around 30k copies sold and roughly 700 reviews). It was created by LeGingerDev and his team of three people (other than him) and during the development he decided to go live on Twitch and stream the whole process.

Over the past few months, we’ve had the chance to chat with its creator a few times (since the game uses Text Animator) and we even had a fun moment where we tried to fix a bug while he was live on Twitch!

Now that the game is out, we thought it would be a great opportunity to chat with LeGingerDev once again and bring you a little behind-the-scenes look at game development! (since it did great and we could all learn something from it!)

The interview

Introduction and first release

Febucci team: Hi LeGingerDev, please introduce yourself and tell us how the post-release period for All Hail the Orb has been going. What has it been like working on updates, additional features, and bug fixes after launch?

Jordan: My name is Jordan, otherwise known as LeGingerDev online and soon to own a company called Bag of Ducks Studio. You can find me on Twitch Mon-Fri. I've been making games for 10 years in Unity and released my first game All Hail the Orb (37 days ago as of writing this)

Post release has been a messy one, as a first time release, I did practically everything wrong. We did release updates every day or every other day to hotfix as many issues as possible, and we had given ourselves a 2 week window to get all these things sorted.

The most notable stupid thing I had done was release a hotfix at 3am and then went to bed, not knowing that I had accidently soft locked the game. So I woke up 5 hours later to my small team all panicking and frantically trying to roll back the project. Essentially I'm an idiot and it was a hard lesson to learn :)

Game origins and development bets

F: Tell us how the idea for the game came about, how long development took, and whether you faced any difficulties along the way.

J: The idea came from me just scrolling through Itch.io's asset store in the 2D art section and seeing a cultist sprite, so I really wanted to make a game based on the cultist. But also I've always wanted to make an incremental game, so I started prototyping roughly an hour every other day since I was still freelancing, until January. This is when I took a rev share for some money to survive to go full time from relatives. And then I spent the next 3 1/2 months making the game full time. So in total about 4 1/2 months total dev time.

The biggest issue was finances, so I took a gamble with it. Fortunately it paid off.

Streaming development on twitch

F: We know that part of the game’s development also happened through live streams on Twitch. Tell us why you decided to take this approach, and how much you think it helped you reach a wider audience.

J: I actually started Twitch prior to making All Hail the Orb as a mechanism to hold myself accountable. I have a really bad time keeping myself motivated at times and on track, so streaming helped alleviate this issue of mine. It helped me out a tonne since I'm a very extroverted person, I made sure to socialise with as many people as possible. Get acquainted with people in the space and make friends with them. I'm not sure it helped reach a "wider" audience, but definitely made developing the game more fun for myself.

Finding a publisher or going self

F: Following up on the previous question, did you ever consider approaching a publisher for funding or services? What led you to work with Grab The Games, and in which areas did they have the biggest impact?

J: I had discussed with the team prior about bringing on a publisher but I never hunted for one. Since the game was doing fine numbers with wishlists. But I stagnated around 5.5k wishlists which was when Grab the Games came and DM'd me. He had a "Golden Goose" contract, a contract that was almost all for my benefit as he really wanted to work with me. This is why 3 weeks prior to release I got a publisher. They helped me get from 5.5k wishlists to 13.3k with my major goal of hitting Popular Upcoming being the main target for myself.

Implementing Text Animator

F: When did you decide to include Text Animator in your project, and what were the reasons behind that choice? Was it your first time using it, or had you already used it before?

J: I've used Text Animator in the past, I bought V2 when it came out years ago and I really just wanted fun looking text. I mean I know how to do effects with Text Mesh Pro but it was another thing I'd have to add to the already growing list of stuff to deal with. So Text Animator V3 had just come out and I jumped on it immediately.

F: Which features of Text Animator did you use the most? In your opinion, what is the best use of Text Animator?

J: The main usage of TA3 for me was the attributes, I for sure didn't utilise it to the best of it's capabilities. But it made having dynamic text a lot easier. Since All Hail the Orb is a "silly" game, it made having silly text all that much easier.

The most important lesson

F: What was the most important lesson you learned from this release? And what did you learn about Steam and its dynamics that you did not know before?

J: Just finish a damn game. Just finish it and release it. Doing the last push of content is the hardest and honestly most boring part of development. It's a lot more fun building systems and architecture than the content that uses it. Also don't release a hotfix then go to bed. We now have a rule in place that it must be at least 3/4 hours before I go to bed. So issues like before don't happen again.

I didn't learn anything new about Steam for this game since I've dabbled with test projects prior to AHTO that used Steams Framework. So it wasn't new. Primarily just learning about Steamworks and the interface, where everything goes and lives on the platform.

Working on a small team

F: What was it like working in a very small team of four people? What challenges did you face, and what lessons did you learn? How did you keep track of everything you were working on?

J: Having a few times in the last few years working with small teams of people amounting to nothing, this was a breath of fresh air. For All Hail the Orb, we essentially had 4 people involved on the project. A developer, an artist, a video editor and an project planner/marketer. The entire team is spread across the world so time zones made it interesting to work with, plus with only me as a developer it wasn't hard to keep track of the state of the game.

Next steps

F: What are your next steps, both personally and as a team?

J: So! We are opening a company called Bag of Ducks Studio which will have me as the founder, and both the artist and marketer from All Hail the Orb as team members. We are making our next game which is a 2 player co-op multiplayer adventure game with inspirations from Forager, Legend fo Zelda, It takes Two and Archvale. This will have a 6-10 month timeline, more likely around 10 months.

Thanks

That's a wrap! Huge thanks to Jordan for taking the time to chat with us and we wish him all the best for his future projects! And once again, we are super happy to see a dev succeed and we have definitely learned something new too.

We hope you enjoyed this new format and see you in the next post!

Ciao 🫶🏼