Nuno Silva

I’m happy

At the end of my second day of full time development of the new version of Orion’s Belt, there is only one thing that i can say: I’m happy

My part is the battle (here is a shot for you that don’t know what the hell i am talking about). In some few words, the battle is no more than a chess like board game, with 8 different units on each side. Each one of them has it’s own attack, defense, range, special abilities and bonus.

In this 3rd version we decided not to change anything in terms of gameplay. The great optimizations will be in the Battle Core and in the Design. Why you ask? Because we consider that we have a pretty mature game, with a very strategic gameplay that our few (but very addicted) players love.

In the engine and in the design are our flaws.

The Engine is not extensible enough and all the Orion’s Belt Core is going to change. So, this is a good chance to upgrade all the code (meaning rewrite 90% of what we made in the past). Rewriting the code means:

• making the battle independent of everything else. If tomorrow we want to build a stand alone application with all this code, it will be possible (at least more possible than with the current version).
• making futures addictions to the core (like new units, new unit powers, new ultimate weapons) very easy to make. In our current version doing all of this is a synonym of making a lot of spaghetti code. In the new version we will simple extend some classes (one for each feature) and the engine will automatically use them.
• full support for 4 players in a single board.
• support for battles against an AI Agent.
• and much, much more

All of this using .NET 2.0 (the use of generics will boost the Battle Core performance).

The new design will also help a lot. We want to make the battle page one of the most cool pages of the new Orion’s Belt version (never forgetting that this page must be cool and usable at the same time). Must be something that the players see and say: WOOOOOOOO.

And who is the guy that going to make this happen? Marco Vale.

Visit his site: it’s worth the time spent

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