One of the hardest tasks we are trying to do is find a balance among the races, and why? The objective of having different races is to please greeks and trojans, each race have their own features, capabilities, strengths and weaknesses, and the personality of each player will decide what race is more pleasant for him.

Now the problem of having so different races is to give all the same power, and most of all, give the need of having all races. For example, in an alliance the members have to be from all different races because that is a very advantage position for accomplish certain kind of quests.

But this can only be tested in a real environment, when the game have a certain number of players that will give us a realistic ideia how all races interact among them, and then do the needed adjustments.

Now that we have a graphical representation of the universe, we stumble upon new design issues. Imagine that you go to your home planet and you create a fleet. How are you going to move it? How are you going to select it on the universe map? We chose to automatically place the new fleet on an adjacent square to the planet.

But then we’ll have an empty fleet… you aren’t supposed to interact with empty fleets, so we’ll have to add some restrictions to disable the fleet movement interface when it’s empty. You’ll be able to see the fleet on your planet and move units between the defense fleet and the new fleet. What if the empty fleet gets attacked? Well, that won’t happen because you can only create fleets on your private zone.

Ah… the Defense Fleet. Can anyone tell us why we had a Defense Fleet and a Repository Fleet on the planets? This always caused many confusions, why the two of them? I had units on the repository, why did I loose my planet?

The Repository fleet was a special kind of fleet that could hold unlimited unit types. One regular fleet can only have up to 8 unit types. The problem was: you could create 20 units at a planet, where should they go? Hence the Repository. We decided to abolish the Repository, we’ll only have the Defense Fleet. Each race can only produce about 10 combat units, but when you buy units from the Auction House, the’ll go to your home planet’s Defense Fleet.

The thing is, you private planets are… private, they won’t be attacked. So there’s no problem in having a fleet with 20 unit types. To move them, you’ll have to create a new fleet and we can enforce that the new fleet will only carry 8 unit types.

You can have planets on the Hot Zone able to build units, but those buildings will have restritions that will allow them to deploy the units only if there’s room on the defense fleet.

So, what do you think about these new game design rules?

When a game involves money several problems need to be avoid or prevented.

1. In Orion’s Belt 2.0 the player can make money(orions) in the game, by doing quests, by selling resources, winning battles, registering in the game… Then is very important to detect earnings of credits that are unlawful (typically to this behavior is given the name of farming).
2. If there is some bug or some problem reported by a player we need to have a system of logs specialized for handling credits information.
3. Detect if the game rules are badly adjusted and is too easy to ear credits for the typical needs, or for the contrary even an addicted player can’t win enough credits for his heeds.

The transaction log will record every orions spent or earned for every player with usefull information, that will help us to correct this kind of problems. Another advantage of this system is to tell us the areas of the game the players prefer and in futures developments we will improved that areas with new features.

We’ve been working hard on the the next iteration of Orion’s Belt 2.0. We want the next Alpha version to be potentially shippable, meaning: you should already play it and it should have a more appealing look, instead of all the raw text everywhere.

I’m preparing the planet management UI and the manual. You can already build units:

The unit prices should be final (by final, I mean that we already worked on them, but they could have some adjustments). As you can see, a Rain will cost 1000 Energy. Every planet will be able to produce the maximum of 10 units of Energy per 10 minutes. At the beginning, when you build the Unit Yard, you’ll have only one planet and produce only 3 Energy per turn. This means that you’ll only be able to build 1 Rain every 2/3 days.

This high cost is mainly to decrease the unit scale on the game. At the beginning, instead of having fleets with 100 Rains, you’ll have 10 Rains.

We have already talked about Ultimate Weapons, now I would like to talk about Ultimate Powers. The new universe interface allows some nice additions to the game play. We’re thinking on adding a supper power per race:

• Light Humans – Deep Space Scanner – this building would allow the light humans to gather information about anything on a given area, for example, inspect a fleet’s units or a planet’s richness.
• Bugs – Worm Hole Creator – The bugs will be able to generate a temporary worm hole, giving them the ability to easily teletrasport to specific places.
• Dark Humans – Devastation – The dark humans will have a major cannon that will be able to target any fleet/planet on the player’s line of sight. The idea is that hitting a fleet will decrease it’s units by some percentage

All these powers will be very expensive, costing as much as 80% of your maximum resource capacity, and will take time to recharge. So, you’ll need to use them wisely. These powers also show that each race will be better for a profession, so you should choose your race accordinaly.

This will also be very important for alliance wars. Just imagine that your scouts (light ship fleets, very fast), detect a large number of enemy fleets. A Bugs player from your alliance could create a worm hole close by, and some light humans players would come quickly and inspect the enemy fleets. The Dark humans players could then hit the more powerful fleets, and you could engage war on your terms, for example, if you had an enemy fleet with only Crusaders, you could attack it with a fleet with just Rains.

What do you think of this?

Oh this comment on the professions post, eXe brought up an interesting idea: could a user have several accounts? Well, we haven’t talked about it yet, and at this time we are not sure on what to do, but we’re preparing our engine to support several players per user account.

And we have several motives for that:

• Races – the player can choose a race, and he might want to try diferent races. It’s better to just allow him to create players, instead of making him create other accounts
• Professions – the player might want to create a pirate character, a trader character, etc
• Improve replayability – WoW players start several characters just because they enjoy replaying the game with another role

This is all very nice, but games in games like WoW, you don’t actually benefit from having multiple characters. You can’t really make all of them attack another player. On Orion’s Belt, you can do that.

One can say that allowing multiple players could induce cheating. Well, I really think that cheaters will cheat anyway. If they can’t create several players with the same account, they’ll just create several accounts and do it anyway, and we will still have to detect cheating.

So, this seams like a nice feature to add to the game, but we would still have to implement some restrictions… like: you would have to choose an active player, and you couldn’t change it every day, or changing could have a cost…

What do you think about all this?

After talking about the combat units per race, we should talk about ultimate weapons. The first game version had only one ultimate weapon: the Battle Moon. On the new version, we’ll want an ultimate weapon per race:

• The Battle Moon will be property of the dark humans
• The light humans will have a Blinker – it allows you to teletransport a square of units to another place, even if they are enemies (imagine you grabbing the opponent’s kamikazes and put them trapped on your side)
• The bugs will have the Queen, that will be able to spawn egs on the battle field that give birth to units. Note that you won’t be able to build those units, or to store them. These units will be created at the battle and will be destroyed after it

The Battle Moon on OB 1.0 was too powerful. We are planning on these restrictions:

• Using the ultimate weapon will consume all your turn’s 6 points
• The ultimate weapon will have a recharge time, enabling you to only use it every 4 ticks (for example)

The ultimate weapons will be very expensive to build, but you’ll also be able to buy/sell them at the auction house (enabling you to have ultimate weapons from other races). So what do you think of these new ultimate weapon ideas?

Well, you could have guessed one of OB 2.0 professions already: Arena Gladiator. I don’t know if the term professions is the best one, basically we’re talking about occupations that the player may choose, that will provide additional income. Examples:

• Pirate – The pirate’s job will be, well… pirating the universe. You see a fleet, you attack her, and if you win you’ll get the loot. As simple as that. There will also be bounties for the meanest pirates.
• Bounty Hunter – The universe police, they will hunt pirates to gain income.
• Merchants – We will have Marketplaces all around the universe, with quests to deliver goods from one place to other. While you’re on a trade route, you can’t use a WormHole, and you gain income if you complete the quest
• Gladiators – Gladiators will jump from arena to arena trying to to be the arena king and gain income by doing that
• Colonizer – We aren’t sure on this one. These would be players that focus on conquering and managing planets

There’s one concept I need to explain before I proceed: loot. When you engage in a battle on the universe, if you win, you’ll get a loot: some resources left by you opponent. When you grab the loot, it won’t be immediately transfered to your “bank account”, you’ll have to cash it in by going to one of your planets. This means that a fleet will have a cargo hole, and while you move to cash in your loot, you may be attacked by a pirate.

Having said that, we can now see how the professions play along:

• Merchants will have to move cargo on trade routes
• Pirates will want to get to those trade routes to attack the merchants
• Bounty hunters will want to get to those trade routes to attack pirates

Now: add Alliances to the equation:

• We’ll have alliances focused on trading, what will assign some members to move the cargo, while other members will defend them
• Pirate Guilds will have to attack trade convoys, by trying to deceive the defenders, to get to the merchants
• Bounty Hunters will have to organize to get to the pirates. Maybe something like: a Trade Alliance will commission another alliance to defend them on a trade route, by paying them. Or an alliance could also create bounties on some pirates.
• Planet Colonization alliances will want to pay for protection and will sell units and resources on the auction house.

One thing we don’t really know, is if the professions should be exclusive. Could some one be a bounty hunter and a pirate and a trader? Like a mercenary? Or should you focus on one profession? The idea is similar to a RPG game: when you perform tasks of a specific profession, you’ll earn experience and improvements. For example, a level 1 pirate could get 10% of the loot, but a level 10 pirate would get 50%.

This is all a bit raw by now, but we’ll start working on it the after the next release. What do you think of these ideas? Got anything else to add? I think that all these interactions will make the game much more enjoyable. There will be no gain on staying on your home planets just gathering resources.

As you may know we’ll have races on OB 2.0, and each race will have about 10-12 combat units available for production. We have splited them like this:

• Race 1, code named Light Humans:
  • Rain, Raptor, Panther, Samurai
  • Pretorian, Krill, Eagle, Kahuna
  • Crusader, Taurus, Nova, Fenix
• Race 2, code named Dark Humans:
  • Dark Rain, Anubis, Toxic
  • Vector, Scarab, Driller, Kamikaze
  • Boozer, Dark Taurus, Dark Crusader, Doomer
• Race 2, code named Bugs:
  • At this moment, only Spider and Black Widow

The Dark versions of Rain, Crusader and Taurus, are similar to the original versions, but with less resistance and more power. The Dark Rain can also replicate.

This unit line up may have some changes, but this is what we have at the moment. What do you think? Are the races well balanced? I think so, I would choose the light humans, but I would miss terribly Kamikaze and Doomer. But remember: you can only build those units, but you can buy the others at the Auction House.
For the Bugs, we want to create additional, original units, with original powers. We already have paralyze and poison, but we would like additional abilities. Any suggestions?

Perhaps one of the most used features in Orion’s Belt 1.0 was the transfer of units between fleets.

In average, a person took (in version 1) about 20 seconds to move a single group of units from one fleet into another. It was a bad design but back then we didn’t found a better solution, so we used the obvious one.

In Orion’s Belt 2 we took (at least in our opinion) a great step ahead with the new layout to move the units.

All the unit changes will be made using drag and drop. So you drag a unit from a fleet, drop in the destiny fleet. A popup will appear, you insert the quantity and the change is made. You make all the moves you want between all fleets and in the end you click in a SAVE button and it’s done.

Each swap takes about 5 seconds to make. So we think it’s a great improvement not only in terms of speed of usage, but also in terms of usability and design.

Here is a screen shot of the functional proof of concept we made: