Yesterday we had the Orion’s Belt lunch. We were only nine, but it was a great gathering. Diogo put the photos on his Flickr Account. We brainstormed a lot and came up with several good ideas for a new race. It was a lot of fun, I hope do do this again, this time with even more players.

I’ve also added another page to the manual: the Cannon Fodder Tactic (Carne para Canhão in Portuguese).

Today I prepared a new page for the manual’s tactics section: Firing Squad. The good about embedding battles is that we can present some nice examples. What do you think of this page? Is it ok to have Orion’s Belt tactics presented that way?

Today at the Orion’s Belt lunch we thought on some useful changes for the Samurai: Catapult and a range of two. This will make the Samurai more powerful, like a Panther. And because of that, the Panther will be changed to the Dark Humans.

We’re starting to work hard on the manual. Having a good manual will be very important for the success of the game, mainly because we use a lot of manual pages as references: units, facilities, etc.

Of course it will be better for us if the community lands a hand. Every manual page now has a message with our email. Basically, if you have any error to report or additional info on the page, you should send us a mail with that information. Your help will be rewarded with 20 orions per page or 50 orions per video tutorial.

For example, I have prepared the Eagle manual page. As you can see it has a nice introduction. And we need something like that for all the units. It would also be great to have for each unit a video tutorial explaining it.

We (the orion’s belt staff) will do that work, but it will take longer than if you help us.

Some may ask: why haven’t you created a wiki? You’ll find your answer here.

After today deploys are much simpler in tournaments.


Usually you have several battles and in each one you have to make a deploy. Many times you repeat the same deploy several times.


Now, only in tournament battles, two new buttons will appear in order to save the current deploy or to load the previous saved one. Hope this way you not get bored each time a tournament starts.

When the tournament “Bug Rampage” begins you’ll be able to test this new feature.

Like you all know, we are trying to find the correct balance between resources incoming and the costs of the buildings and units. Now we can see how much of each resource the players have, and with this information find the resources in higher and lower quantity.

Today we adjusted the general rare resources prices on the game. Please check out if they are more just. We also updated the manual with these new costs.

We also created two additional merchant quests: Complete four trade routes using Tools or Supplies and Complete ten trade routes using Tools or Supplies in 24 hours. So if you chose to be a merchant, please check them out.

Now we have the first timed quest. We had to make some adjustments to prevent cheating, so at this moment you’ll only be able to load trade goods if you’re on a trade route quest and if you abandon a trade route quest all the trade goods on your fleets will vanish.

I have just made the bounties available. For now, if you go to the Quests page you’ll see the current list of bounties, available for your level:

We only had one player with pirate ranking, so I had to hack the database and add others. Note that you should be a pirate or a bounty hunter. Tomorrow we’ll try to add additional quests for the pirate and the merchant.

We are also working on some new universe stations: the academy, where bounty hunters can go for some information sharing, and the pirate bay, that will have resources for pirates.

Has been an incredible experience being in a major event in the world of browser games. Now we can really see how small is the portuguese market, none of the people know anything about portuguese productions or about the portuguese market.

We talk with the most of the biggest companies in the event and we realize some strategies to publicize the Orion’s Belt so that we can obtain the maximum possible players.  We can use as examples some cases, but we must be aware that every case is a different one depending on the reality as it is part of, and try to go in the direction from it more convenient for the Orion’s Belt.

In my opinion apart from trying to reach the markets of the English language also we have to focus on markets in central Europe because they are large consumers of such games. The difficulty is proving that a Portuguese game can be as good as a game produced in countries traditionally very good in the development of such games.

Some statistics presented surprised me too, such as the number of females who have played such games, in the previous version of Orion’s Belt we can’t confirm that statistic but I am curious to see what happens in this new version.

Another issue that I also had no conscience are the legal problems that may be raised when you have an online game, and then may vary depending on the laws of each country, so in the future we will take certain measures to protect ourselves from some of these problems.

I end this post with a team picture. From left to right, the Michelin mascot…sorry my mistake, Nuno, Pedro and me.

The implementation of trade routes presented here is already up and running. You now also have the new Merchant quests to follow. First you need to find a market (note that we implemented market registering only some days ago, so you may need to go there again).

The next quest is the trade route: you need to go to a market and on the market page you will have two new panels:

• A trade route panel where you’ll be able to load the current market’s resource into your fleet and unload the current trade goods
• A list of the nearest markets

You’ll only have to load a resource on a market, and unload it on another market, and you’ll complete a trade route. Note that pirate, merchant and bounty hunter quests are now exclusive, you can only do one of them at a time.

Trade route resources are special and are only used for trading. We added eight new trade route resources, that will allow us to do some nice quests like: perform a trade route with Tools, Supplies, Medicine and Alcohol.

We are going this weekend to Frankfurt to attend the Browser Games Forum 2008, where we plan to learn from the industry veterans and do some networking.

That being said, behave yourselfs on the game while we’re gone.