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.

The Game
Orion's Belt provides two distinct competitions: the round and tournaments.

The Round


In an Orion's Belt round the player starts with his Home Planet and has to expand. The game has two very different sides: on one hand the player has all the planet management and tunning, with several buildings, research, and combat units. The objective is to make the planet's production as high as possible, to be able to manufacture many combat units.

The other side of the game is the combat mode. In Orion's Belt there are no automatic battle resolutions. Every battle is performed in a board game style, where each player's units are face to face. Each combat unit has it's own strengths and weaknesses, making the combats a very intellectual challenge. This combat characteristic provides the advantage for the best board players and not for the player with the most combat units.

The rounds usually last for 6 months. When a round ends, the game is restarted.

The Tournaments
In the tournaments players are given a fleet with a predefined set of units and have to battle trough the available competitions. The tournament battles count for the Orion's Belt Elo rating system. There are several tournament types available:
 * Total Annihilation - the objective is to eliminate all of the other players units
 * Regicide - the objective is to eliminate a special flag unit (this game type resembles Chess, in with you win when you cheque mate
 * Domination - you have to control some board places to earn points; after the predefined turn count ends, the player with the most points win

The tournaments are divided in two phases:
 * Groups - all the players are divided in groups, with the maximum of 10 players
 * Playoffs - the 3 best players from each group are then matched in playoffs