We changed the number of stolen resources on a Raid. Now you’ll steal a percentage of the target player’s stonger resource plus a percentage from one of the other resources.

The percentages are less than before, but now you steal from two resources, so it’s your gain.

We have just added two new shop services: Intrinsic Deduction and Rare Deduction. You can buy them and use them for a month. We are thinking in allowing smaller time intervals, maybe a week. What do you think?

We have also other services in queue:

• Increasing in X% the production factor (making everything faster to build)
• Removing Fog of War
• Making all the map visible (but with fog of war)

Today we made the tournaments page pretier and with additional features. Now we present a preview of the latest battle moves played. It turned out to be quite cool.

We added in the Account page one link named Extract. This link takes you to a page where all your transactions with Orions are listed.

The older players can find some inconsistencies because in the beginning we weren’t log all the transactions. Another difference between the balance in the list and the current value of Orions is related with the bids. When you do a bid we take the Orions virtually, this means that just when you win a bid that transaction appear in the list, in the period that you have the highest bid exist the bid difference.

Merry christmas everybody!

As you may see, you also have that greeting on your home page. That’s because we now have a global messages system, where we’ll be able to post some notifications (for example, when a tournament starts).

We also added the first version of the shop. On your account you’ll be able to use Orions to buy certain services or products. At this moment we only have additional Queue Space for sale.

And we also fixed a lot of bugs and added some other asked features like sorting auction house items.

The universe has been updated several times in the last week.

First the layout. The layout is now more close to the one that we going to have when the game is released. The only thing is missing is a little bit polishing and it’s final. Here is a screen shot:

Other of the updates is the possibility to see the units of your fleet in the universe popup. I think this feature will be extremely useful because you can see on the fly which is the battle potential of that fleet:

Finally i think we finally corrected the raids. Now you have a timeout of 800 minutes before you can raid the same planet again.

In the majority of the online auction houses, the time limit to make bid is increased if a bid is made in the last minutes. We changed Orion’s Belt, so now we a bid is made in the last 10 minutes the timeout is increased 10 more minutes.

We updated the auction house and now it is not possible to bid or buyout products put in the auction house by other accounts of the same player. This change was asked by several players, and after we spoke among us, we think that is fundamental to have this rule to avoid “farming” using the different accounts.

Who started a party without inviting me?

The project that started on April 2003, by Pedro Santos and Nuno Silva ends today. Behind we leave 5 years of experience and a lot of good friends. But this is not a moment to be sad, because Orion’s Belt 2.0 is going to be launched in a couple of weeks. We completely rewrote the game, changed the rules, and Orion’s Belt is looking better than ever! Even so, it’s time for some retrospective.

At the Beginning

It all started because we needed to make a school project using ASP.NET and C#. And we came up with the idea of implementing a Dark Galaxy clone. Nuno had the creative idea of implementing the battles on a board game. At that time I really disliked the idea, I tought that it would ruin the game. But after some discussion I went along and now we have our great strategy board game.

When we got the first version we hosted it on a shared server. We didn’t have a lot of money, and we had to struggle to pay for it. Here are images from the first version:

Combat	Combat Units Production	Top Rulers
Planet Scan	Planet List	Planet Information

We had 3 skins, that was a major mistake. We soon learned that maintaining 3 skins was too troublesome.

After the Beginning

I must say it again: we had a lot of problems hosting the game. We tried sponsors, tried ads, but we didn’t had much luck. We sent mails to everybody we could, some didn’t even reply, others offered to help but with some technologic restrictions. At some point the guys from Cluster Cube offered a hand and we did quite ok.

Then we stumbled upon other problem: game distribution. We had very few players. I understand if we have 50000 players and only 50 of them are playing the game. Ok, people tried and didn’t like it. But in 3/4 years we only had about 3000 registrations. They were few, but good. We made a lot of friends from the most active players, that are still with us today.

We also had another major problem: our graphics were crappy. But we had the huge luck of getting Zeroshift‘s help. This guy is responsible for the design of almost all our combat units! Kudos to him!

GAMES 2006

The year of 2006 brought us GAMES 2006, a Portuguese competition were Orion’s Belt won the Best Technology and Best Internet Game awards. At this time Tiago was already on the team.

School ends, what now?

We hadn’t even finished school and we already had a contract signed to work for Safira. We wanted to launch the game on our own, but we didn’t have the business skills to do so, and we knew it. So we figured it was best to gain some corporate experience and think again on launching the game a couple of years later. At this time we were getting paid, so we could easily afford the server expenses.

The game was a hobby. We worked on it after work ours and that reflected poorly on the game. Suddenly, we didn’t have the time to fix bugs or attend to the game’s problems. We lost a lot of players because of that. It was with great sacrifice and pleasure that we maintained the game for almost two years while working hard on our companies. It was worth it.

Then we met our current employer: PDM&FC. A company for bright enterprenuers that gives their staff the possibility to work on their own projects. We did some outsourcing, then some other projects, and six months ago we started working full time on Orion’s Belt. 20.

And we tagged along with our good friends from Vortix Games that are providing us the all the artistc material we may need, as long with some nice advices and brainstorms.

And what now?

It’s been a long time since we started Orion’s Belt. We have great pride in our project and in all the sacrificies we had to make. Now we are at a position to launch a better game and we want it to be a success. Future will tell if we’re up for it.