Keep on Target: An Interview with Frost Lab Studios About Orbit Quest

Published: November 7, 2018 12:00 PM /

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orbit quest banner

At a Playcrafting event I got to check out a lot of cool games. One of these games was Orbit Quest, a platformer where you had to jump from planet's orbits to collect warp cores. We got a chance to play it back at Play NYC, but I wanted to learn more about the game. Thankfully the opportunity presented itself, and I got a chance to talk to both Frost Lab Studios' director Stephen Judge and composer Maeto Nossa. They were more than willing to talk about this quest.


TechRaptor: Okay. So, Stephen, Mateo. I just played Orbit Quest. Can you guys just give me a quick run down on the game?

Stephen Judge: So, Orbit Quest is a space platformer where you're hopping from orbit to orbit to try and collect warp cores to fix your warp drive and blast off to the next galaxy. The story of the game is about, you play as Ava Knight, an amazing space pirate who is trying to collect resources for Earth's last space colonies, but she got sucked into a black hole and sent to the end of the galaxy.

TechRaptor: I hate when that happens.

Stephen: It sucks man. It's the worst. [Laughter.] Yeah, it really puts a downer on your day.

TechRaptor: Yeah.

Stephen: So, yeah. So now she's got to fix her warp drive to get back home. And that's where you come in.

Maeto Nossa: So what you do is you have to get warp cores, which are parts of the warp drive, so you can get to the next system of planets. So you have to jump from system to system until you get home.

orbit quest jump

TechRaptor: When you guys started Orbit Quest, how did the original idea come about?

Maeto: We started at the beginning of this year, maybe at the end of last one. So we've been working together for a while on different games, and this came out as an idea with a bunch of people not at Frost Lab, but we ended up taking the reigns of the project and brought it into Frost Lab and this is how its turned out.

TechRaptor: So in this game you're jumping from planet to planet, going through their orbits. Besides just jumping, what other stuff will you be seeing in the game?

Stephen: So there's going to be a lot of alien monsters that are in there, so you're going to have to avoid them. There's going to be different sorts of puzzle elements to the game as well, that you'll reach as you go on. There's also going to be boss battles and... yeah. A lot of things, there's a lot of hidden secrets to collect. Definitely different secret places, like dungeon areas in the levels too.

Maeto: The thing about the collectables is they will tell you more about the universe she lives in and the story of Ava's colony.

TechRaptor: So I'm curious, how does a boss battle work in a game like this?

Stephen: So the way that... it's going to involve this element of, there's basically these sort of docks that you can get in to, that you'll be able to kind of shoot at them with. So you're sort of hopping from orbit to orbit dodging the boss, trying to get in to these docks, and then shoot them over there, and then once that one gets destroyed you move to the next one. Each level will have like different ways of beating them, but that would be one type of boss that you'd face with.

TechRaptor: Is it difficult to design a game around the constant orbiting? Was that something hard to work around?

Stephen: It was... its definitely presented challenges in the sense of just like trying to design levels for it. It's not a linear type of platformer, you can go in many different types of directions, and its definitely kind of opened up, uh, definitely kind of a different way we'd approach building these levels because of that. One issue was whether you shoot through the planet, like if you go through planets, or you just crash into the planets. We've had to develop things like that. Or just the different radius of the orbits themselves, or just things like that.

orbit quest flying

TechRaptor: While I'm playing this there's like a fun, peppy, sci-fi soundtrack. What goes into composing that?

Maeto: It actually was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. We sat together and thought about different games that had a similar, or the sound would be similar. We got influenced by a couple of video games regarding the music, and then I just sat up and started composing. It wasn't really that hard, it was a lot of fun. I worked with Noah Kellman, which is the other composer and sound designed, and yeah. We went back and forth between ideas and this is how it turned out.

TechRaptor: Awesome. So, Orbit Quest. When can I play it?

Maeto: The game will be released probably by the end of the winter or before the winter ends. So that would mean... around Februaryish.

TechRaptor: And what will I be able to play it on?

Stephen: So it's going to be for iOS, Android, Steam, Game Jolt, and also we're going to try and get it on the Xbox too.

TechRaptor: Awesome. Well I'd like to thank both of you guys for taking the time to talk with me, it was really cool getting to see this.

Stephen: Awesome, thank you so much.

Maeto: Thank you very much.


We'd like to once again thank Stephen and Maeto for taking the time to talk with us.

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Samuel Guglielmo TechRaptor
| Reviews Editor

I'm Sam. I have been playing video games since my parents brought home a PlayStation whenever that came out. Started writing for TechRaptor for 2016 and,… More about Samuel