Orion’s Belt team will be present at the XL Party, at FIL. We’re there today and we also will be next Saturday and Sunday. So, if you visit the expo, don’t forget to drop by our stand, talk to us and get some free orion cards.

In a partnership with Goody, the PlayStation Official Magazine of December will offer 10€ cards to those who buy the magazine.

Unfortunately we only managed to get this promotion in Portugal.

Below is the official banner (in Portuguese) of the magazine:

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.

Browser Game of the Year competion is now online and Orion’s Belt is part of it. We have the pleasure to anounce that orion’s Belt is one of the nominees in the Best Strategy Game Category.

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

Not all players today will remember the early days when we launched the first Orion’s Belt version. It was a very raw an unstable school project then. I remember that we had to reset the universe several times. At that time the majority of players where Portuguese and where our friends or from the Gamedev PT community. Today we’re different, the game’s different. We even get nominations here and there. Now we have a more stable project and we’re proud of it. Also, for the first time we have more foreigners then Portuguese players. We’re at the last day of 2009 and we’d like to share with you how the game was before.

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…

The prestigious Browser Game of the Year Award, featured by Galaxy News, is now getting votes. For those that don’t know this event, this award has a major importance on this business sector. And we are very honored to have been nominated on the Strategy category.

Unfortunately, like on the BBGSite competition, this award is chosen by votes, meaning that the game with the most active players will be the winner. Even so, we’ll try to make our stand and we are very happy to have been considered for that category.

It’s now possible to publish your victories on facebook/twitter. You just need to be at a finished battle screen, and you’ll have the following icons:

Pressing on those icons will allow you to post a status update on the desired site. For example, I posted a victory over Amazing Kazoo on my facebook profile page:

You may favorite or become a fan of our facebook application here at the Orion’s Belt Facebook Application. If the players start to use this, we’ll add more of these icons on other scenarios, for example, when a devastation is fired.

BBGSite is making it’s own version of Best browser game of the year. Orion’s Belt it’s competing in 2 categories: Favorite Strategy Game and Best New Game.

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/

During this season the shop will have available a special ofter for you. For only 1500 Orions, you’ll be able to buy:

• 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.

During this month, we’ll be having a special bring a friend campaign. Every player that registers via your referral link (that you can find here or use the mail option) will earn you 20 orions. That’s the same as full day voting. This is a direct prize, and you’ll also be eligible for the remaining referral reward bonus.

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