It would have been easier, in some ways, to build FieldGoal first and worry about what Orange Flame actually is later. Plenty of studios start that way: one project becomes the identity almost by accident, and everything after it either has to fit the mould or fight against it.
I didn't want that. Before I wrote a line of FieldGoal's simulation code, I wanted a clearer answer to a different question: what kind of studio makes something like this, and what else might that same studio want to make?
ONE PROJECT
SHOULDN'T DEFINE THE STUDIO.
The risk with letting a single early project define a studio is that it quietly narrows everything that comes after. If Orange Flame becomes "the basketball sim studio" by default rather than by choice, then the next idea — a different genre, a different medium, something that isn't a game at all — starts to feel like a departure instead of a natural next step.
I'd rather the opposite be true. FieldGoal should be recognisably a product of Orange Flame's thinking — the emphasis on systems, memory, consequence and world-state — without being the definition of what that thinking is limited to. The studio is the constant. The projects are where it gets applied.
FEEL LIKE A WORLD.
WHY BASKETBALL
WAS THE FIRST TEST.
Basketball ended up being the first place to test that thinking, mostly because I already understood the sport well enough to know where the interesting problems were. A basketball season has structure, history, rivalries, careers and consequences built into it already — it was a good proving ground for the idea that systems could feel like a world rather than a spreadsheet.
But the underlying interest was never really "make a basketball game." It was closer to: what happens when you take something with real structure and give it memory, consequence and a place for decisions to matter over time? Basketball happened to be the clearest way to explore that first.
DELIBERATELY
BROAD, ON PURPOSE.
That's why I think of Orange Flame as deliberately broader than FieldGoal, even while FieldGoal is the only thing visibly in development right now. Games are one direction the studio can go. Products, experiments, visual work and stranger ideas can exist alongside them, without needing to justify themselves against a basketball simulation.
I'm building all of this slowly and mostly in public, because I'd rather the studio's identity form honestly over time than get assigned to it early by whatever ships first. FieldGoal is the clearest expression of the studio's thinking so far. It isn't the ceiling on what that thinking can become.
— Jordan