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.