We’ll have our on stand and we’ll be present at the XL LAN Party this weekend in Pombal. If you’re going to attend do visit us and you may get some goodies. We’ll post some photos on the next week.

The other day we (the team) were talking about the problems of this server and how to solve them. And we came to realize that although all the problems, this S1 was phenomenal. We, and I hope the majority of players, had a blast playing it. There were lots of events, lots of alliances leading, the universe were far from dull.

What a great journey we had up until now. Let’s hope to make the game even better, and larger!

The thing is… we never thought that an alliance could achieve this. The relics should work like a leader board. You climb your way to the top and then you try to stay there as long as you can. I don’t believe that any other force on the universe can overcome DS as they are now, not on the next couple of months.

So this brings us to a dilemma: what should we do? We have several ideas to make Orion’s Belt more interesting, for example:

• Increase the number of levels of facilities and the construction speed (for example, 500 levels). The idea is to have player climbing a level every week.
• Make the private zone faster to move and with bot challenges, for new players to start from the beginning to interact with the battles
• Make alliances with a cap  limits: starting at 5 members, admirals would have to pay to buy more members support, up to 20
• Make more quests
• Put mobs on the universe
• Create even more alliance challenges, besides the relics: the idea is to make an alliance focus on some challenge. We could have the relics challenge, merchant alliance challenges, etc

We have come up with most of these ideas for quite a while. The problem with this is that most of the ideas would require a reset on the game. And there are those that would not like that. Even if we keep your orions, elo ranking, services, etc, there are players that don’t want to start over, because they spent to much time and resources already.

An alternative is to leave s1 like for as long as it has active players, and start a new game on s2 with the new rules.

We are thinking on several options to make Orion’s Belt better, and now is your time to say your thoughts.

To vote, you have to use your facebook account or your twitter account or your email account (or all of them)!

You can vote in orion’s Belt using the following button (that is also available in the vote page of the game):

This competition is the most important competition regarding browser games, so

Help us to make Orion’s Belt the Best Strategy Game of the year.

You can see the details of the contest here: http://contest.bbgsite.com/gameprize/webapps/

Thank you all

During all this time our major strength prevailed: the community. But who among the current players remember the first battle version? Wait no more, here it is:

We only had 3 combat units back then, with funny names, like “Nave Chunga (Poor Ship)“. There weren’t any special abilities and to attack the units would occupy the target’s square and a versus image would appear. You could also delay deploy. As you can see on the top of the board, you could have units outside the game and you could add them to the game at any time. As you might imagine, that brought us major problems and we got rid of that.

At that time the game supported multiple skins. We also ditched that: it was to troublesome to keep updating all the skins. And the majority of players stayed with the default one. Here’s my skin, showing the planets overview page:

It was very static back then, and there weren’t races. There weren’t also the Private Zone/Hot Zone concept, but you weren’t able to attack home planets. The planets were so much harder to manage… you had to contemplate lots of resources, pollution, rare resources, food, production speed, oh well… some players still miss that.

At that time we had very few players, about 10-30 active players. You can see that on the Tops Page I have here, this was the skin made by Pyro (Nuno Silva):

We didn’t have ELO rankings at that time, tournaments came much later. But the universe battles were well disputed and we have a lot of nice stories about it.

At that time, we hadn’t a visual representation of the universe. So the best we came up with was the radar:

Players could get reports about planets: resources, combat units, etc. That would cost energy and was very used.

About one year later we got a friend to make the next version of OB, with the combat system you know today. That came with a new fancy skin and we eliminated all the rest. Soon after we got to the Games 2006 competition and won the Best Technology and Best Online Game awards. Here’s our promotion board back then:

The game stayed on this version for a long time. At a given time, we had the game so stable that we didn’t get any bug reports! At that time the game became stale, we didn’t add anything, and it didn’t grow much. We were working on other projects and we couldn’t properly evolve Orion’s Belt. But about two years ago our employer PDM&FC put us on the Orion’s Belt 2.0 Project! We did a major rewrite, and changed a lot of rules. With all the experience we got with the first version, it was only needed six months for the firs alpha release of this version.

Did you follow on that time? Do you remember the first universe representation? No? Well, on July the 28th we released an image with the first representation of the universe:

Yes, that tiny orange thingy is a fleet. We were also working on planet management. That changed a lot, and we wanted a lot of eye candy. Here’s the first preview of what we wanted:

It changed a lot as you know, but the baseline was this. At Jan 14th of 2009 we launched Sirius, this was the first time we put the new Orion’s Belt available for the general audience. This was a version very similar with what you have today. We did implement many more features, but the core is the same.

After the launch, we started to promote the game. We went to two Portuguese television shows, to Curto Circuito and to Insert Coin.

We also did several interviews for several web sites, and for a major Portuguese daily newspaper.

We always had great players that contributed a lot to the game. Sometimes we also eat with them:

But all these efforts brought little players to the game. To try to attack that problem, we went to Frankfurt, for the Browser Games Forum, where all the major players participate. We learned a lot and made a lot of connections.

The game is growing very much, so much that we are now facing game design problems because of it. Even so, even being so small, the game got the attention of the specialized media. Orion’s Belt got nominated for Best New Game and Favorite Strategy Game by BBGSite, and for Best Strategy Game by Galaxy News.

We believe that we only need players to succeed. And once we reach a greater audience the game that we all love will be a huge success and we the administrators will be riding this epic mount (notice the license plate):

And we do have a lot of surprises for the players. We know that sometimes we take a bit longer to do stuff, but you have to believe us when we say that it’s for a good reason. This year is ending, and with YOUR help we made Orion’s Belt what it is today. We are very proud, and you should be also. I hope you liked our picture by picture story, and here’s something for the future…

Vacations

We have already shortened the vacations given by the game. But that’s not enough. Vacations should be something used as a last resource, but we have a lot of complaints about players that stay on vacations for a long time. And unfortunately we can’t allow that, we have to stand by the active players. Having one player freezing battles for months, isn’t doable.

So we are also going to change the cost of vacations that you can buy. The cost will be based on the number of vacations you have already bought on the last couple of months. So if you haven’t bought any, the price will be low, but will grow big if you start to buy lots of it.

Give Up, Scout Fleets and Immunity

I think that give up is the most misused feature of the game. Really. Think about it: when do you use give up, when do you really need it? I use it mostly on tournament battles that I now I have lost. But on the context of the universe, we don’t really see much use for it. Even so it’s one of the major actions being used. Players give up and attack with another fleet. This means that it isn’t the winner that controls the end of the match, but the looser.

Fleet immunity will attenuate this, but we’re also considering removing the give up function from universe battles. The other problem is players using a small fleet to stop/intercept other threatening fleets. I think this may be a valid tactic, especially with immunities and without the give up. But if it’s a valid tactic, it should have a cost. If you stop a powerful fleet with a dummy fleet just to slow it down, it should cost you. We are still thinking about what to do about this.

Supreme Alliance

The other issue we have to face is the imminence of having an all powerful alliance controlling the universe. This is very bad, for all the players. The players that aren’t on that alliance are not motivated because they can’t stand a chance. And what will happen if that alliance kills the resistance? They will loose motivation because there aren’t more enemies to attack.

The problem here was caused by game design, we should have come up with something to prevent this. We still don’t know how to address this.

Conclusion

We know that sometimes we’re slow to provide a response to the problems. Please bare with us, because sometimes the problems aren’t trivial to solve. But we are always on alert and we do listen to you. The game’s community has always been a great asset in solving these situations, and we’ll appreciate the ideas you may provide. We’ll implement this issues as soon as possible, and we’ll stay alert and try to make all the rules as balanced as possible.

Thank you for your patience.

I would like you all to participate in this event. It’s possible to vote daily from December 8 until January the 8.

To vote Just click on the above links, search for Orion’s Belt between the games presented, and click Vote

In alternative, you can use the vote page of Orion’s Belt

Help us to make Orion’s Belt the best Strategy and New Game of the year.

You can see the details of the contest here: http://contest.bbgsite.com/gameprize/webapps/

• 6 months of every premium service
• a fleet with Mercs units, including the mighty Metallic Beard

There are many ways to earn orions, and during this month you can also use the special referral bonus.

It’s only required that your friend confirm the mail address. After that you’ll get your orions reward.