When Mitchell Robinson began development ofSector’s Edgein 2017, it was just a side project with his brother. Now, after years of working and saving, they’re developing thePCgame with a small team based out of Australia. Its recently launched open beta has presented a terrific opportunity to gain feedback from a wider range of players.
Robinson spoke with Game Rant about how Vericidium createdSector’s Edge,and how it monitors the open beta performance. “It’s good to hear a fresh player’s perspective who’ has never played the game before,” Robinson said. “We know what can kill a game. What we hate about some other games that really get on our nerves.” Growing up a fan offirst-person shooters, Robinson wants to keep the casual gameplay spirit alive.
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The Innovative Systems Behind Sector’s Edge
Sector’s Edgeis the brainchild of Robinson and his brother Simon, from the base software to its enhanced audio. “Everything you see in the game was created by Simon, then all the programming was done by me,” Robinson said. “We wanted to know as much as we could, so that even if we failed, we could start the next game from a much better position.” Theycreated their own programming engineusing C# and OpenGL to have complete control over every aspect of the game, including networking, rendering, input, UI, collision detection, animations, and more.
“My dad’s a programmer, and he gave me a program, BASIC code, and he said, ‘Here, you can draw a triangle with this.’ And he said, ‘Just go from there.’ So from the triangle, I turned it into a boxel. I turned it into a map. I learned how to import models from Blendr. I learned how to put UI in. So I kind of started at the very bottom and worked my way up.”
When it came to the game’s environments, Robinson said “we set it in the distant future, at the very edge of the universe,” hence its title. A key feature to gameplay is the player’s ability to build several structures that can be reinforced or destroyed. Finally, a uniqueweapon attachment systemwas developed in hopes of simplifying the player’s options.
“Rather than having one weapon here and one weapon here, you’re able to customize it to have a kind of weapon in-between that you want.” Inspired by titles such asBattlefieldandAce of Spades, Robinson hoped to create a game with players experience as the top priority.
Sector’s Edge Uses Ray Traced Audio for Realistic Environments
Among the innovations created forSector’s Edge, one of Robinson’s proudest is its sound design. Like so much else in this game, it was built from scratch. “We made a customray tracing audio enginewhich casts rays outward from the player and figures out the size of the room, what the echo should sound like, whether a sound is on the other side of a wall and should be muffled, or if it’s in a clear line of sight,” Robinson said. Several players have praised the studio for its audio, according to Robinson, calling it some of the best they’ve ever heard in a first-person shooter.
“I was always wanting to know what’s the next thing that I need to do in this game engine to make it a playable game. It is the network? Was it the UI? Is it the sound? Like it’s nothing I can lose. It’s this knowledge I’ve got like looking back on all the things that I’ve learned. I’m proud of myself. The fact that it’s taken so much longer to get here, but I’d say it’s 100 percent worth it.”
The team under the brothers at Vericidium is made up of die-hard video game enthusiasts like their lead developers, people who Robinson said get excited to play their own game whenever a trailer comes out. “That’s when we know we’re on the right track and that we’re making something we can be proud of.” Although the release of the full version ofSector’s Edgehas not yet been announced,feedback from players on the betais being carefully monitored, documented, and considered for future developments. “We want our players to play the game to its full potential, but we also haven’t shown everything you’re able to do [yet],” Robinson said.
TheSector’s EdgeBeta is free-to-play on Steam.
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