Sector53 Development Log 1

It's been a little while now since we decided to start building Sector 53, our asteroid mining game, based on an old Amiga classic "K240".

Things have moved on nicely since our announcement a year ago.

Development is a little slow though, as it's only a small indie development team, working in spare time (and not paid anything!).

In the year of time we have had, we've been creating new 3D models for the buildings, updating the game objects and other 3D elements to start giving a bit more depth and added a lot of the gameplay code in now.

The main focus however has been on the actual mechanics of the game, the core AI and the ability to save and load all this data.

There is a heck of a lot to do before this is going to be playable, but it's core mechanics are working well now.

You can now build up a nice little ecosystem on the asteroid and mine it, as well as build ships, send them to other sectors to explore, find enemy asteroids and attack them!

Missile silos that launch long range attacks are starting to be programmed now too.

AI programming is throwing up some challenges with the amount of code needed to figure everything out that each AI player needs to do, so this part is taking a lot of time to progress.

Though, the AI can now do a bit of thinking for itself and build required buildings, ships and start mining resources. It can't do much else yet and their ships wont go any where or attack anyone, but they are self sufficient at least!

There are plans for a number of Races to pit the player up against, each with their own strategy and difficulty.

Back to the gameplay, we now have a solid 20 or so buildings to build with many more planned.

Shornsoft are kindly proving a number of buildings for us.

Only 3 ship models are ready but we are looking at getting some user submitted ships into the game to help move things along quicker.

Twitter follower @CGLuke has provided our first user ship and is already in the game! Hit us up on twitter or on our contact page if you want to get involved and we will send you some details on what we need.

The user interface is not very pretty, a bit clunky and not really how it will end up, but it's functional. We will work more on cosmetics once the game is playable.

Feedback is welcomed and don't forget to Follow us on Twitter for more frequent screenshots and gameplay videos as we make it!

Take a look at some of the latest screenshots below.

Written by Ford Hollett on the 9/23/2016