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Development continues on Sector53, our space based, asteroid mining game based on the old Amiga title “K240” by Gremlin Interactive.
Here is a bit of an update on things.
Previously we mentioned about working on the AI and this has continued.
This has been much harder than expected, so progress has been a little slow.
We have moved it forward somewhat and have a decent level of AI self-sufficiency, though a lot of this code needed to be re-written in order to advance it.
Further work in this area is really the focus moving forward, as the AI still can’t yet attack you or do much else than keep their asteroid running, which doesn’t give you as a player much of a challenge!
Much of the focus of the last few months has been on things like the sector map to navigate and move ships around. I was not happy with the flat 2D map, now this is a full 3D game.
Therefore this is in the process of being changed to a new 3D map.
This will give some nicer effects and actually in the long run be easier to develop on, as the 2D map was full of lots of calculations to convert positions and things to the 2D simplified versions.
The new 3D map makes this element easier to do by using an alternative camera and some clever bits of UI to pull it together.
It doesn’t look like much just at the moment as it is in process of the conversion.
During some down time while I was sick for a few weeks, I made some progress on the story line, along with a little help from the original developer of the Amiga game (K240), Graeme Ing!
He also writes Sci-Fi novels and provided some great ideas for Sector53’s background (Goes without saying we had some nice developer chats too!).
The community, including Graeme, have also continued to provide more feedback on the current Alpha released and have played some of these incomplete versions, just to give some idea of the feel and where it is heading.
From this I have added a lot more into the game, including adding in some of the community as actual characters in the story line.
Some other stuff worked on includes:
Saved Games
Load Games
Character Generation Scripts
Story Line scripts
Tutorial Level
New Music added (thanks to New Light Audio and Lemnisc8)
Performance updates and code refactoring
Many many bug fixes!
A few thanks are in order, as there are a number of people who have contributed so far and continue to do so.
So thank you all.
Here are a few people that deserve and extra thanks:
- Graeme Ing: a huge thanks to your support, development insight, story line ideas and most importantly play testing feedback!
- Ale: Some feedback very close to Graeme, helping focus efforts on the right areas
- Leyton Carter: For providing an initial placeholder sound track, many hours of hard work right there!
- JumailJ: For providing many great 3D models now in the game
- K240 Facebook Group: For giving support, feedback and further ideas
Moving forward, more work on the new map, sending ships to other locations and the campaign levels are under way, as well as more AI work of course!
A more recent Alpha version (1.15.1) was released on 31st October 2018, to Patrons to play as it stands at the moment.
There is a PC and Mac OSX alpha release, playable now.
You too can get the alpha version of the ga
Written by Ford Hollett on the 11/1/2018
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