Orion's Belt (game)

Orion's Belt is a free web based game, created by two Portuguese students of ISEL for their Bachelor's degree. In this game the player has to manage several planets and grow his empire battling other players. Orion's Belt has the influence of several known games like Master of Orion and Heroes of Might and Magic.

History
The game was released in a very beta state in October 2003 for a few Portuguese players, mainly from the portuguese gamedev community. The game was launched as an open source project, supported by SourceForge.net and deployed in a server with several limitations.

As the game grown, the two students faced several problems to support the project. For this king of web applications is needed a good hosting service, and good hosting services are expensive for two students with no income. To face these problem they moved from server to server several times, trying to find an appropriate hosting provider.

As the time went by, the game started to grow in popularity, mainly due to the Portuguese TV channel RTP2 that made a review of Orion's Belt at June 2005 via the Quiosque magazine.

Several Portuguese game related magazine and sites also published interviews with the Orion's Belt developers, increasing even further the game popularity in the Portuguese context.

In September 2006 Orion's Belt entered the GAMES2006 game development festival: a competition by APROJE with the objective to support the Portuguese game development projects. Orion's Belt won the Best Technology and the Best Internet Game awards and the developers were addressed by GAMEINVEST, that wanted to invest in a commercial version of the game.

At present time, Orion's Belt is still a non-commercial game, but the developers and the community are working towards a new version. These new developments are reported on the project's blog.