Following years in development, Sector's Edge can now be played in open beta. The PC title, created by Sydney, Australia-based studio Vercidium, is the pet project of Mitchell Robinson and his brother Simon. It was built using a homemade engine developed by Mitchell himself to stand out from any other first-person shooter on the market, transporting to a futuristic world on the edge of the known galaxy where they can engage in casual combat.

Mitchell Robinson spoke with Game Rant about the multi-year journey he and his family took to make Sector's Edge, which is available to play now on Steam. Interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Q: You developed this game with your brother Simon in Australia. What is Sector’s Edge and who do you recommend it for?

A: My brother is the creative brains. Everything you see in the game was created by Simon, and all the programming was done by me. We’ve always wanted to work on a project, but every game I made didn’t look very good. So I would kind of lose motivation. Whereas Simon was always making cool stuff but never really had a project to put it towards. So one day, we started working on this together. I’d say it's for fans of first-person shooters that just want to play, like they’re not interested in the ranked matchmaking or the ELL or the tournaments. They just want to play a few games. Have fun. Get in get out. I’d say it’s a more casual first-person shooter, which I don’t see enough of these days.

Sectors Edge engineer veteran

Q: There are building elements to this game. What made you decide that you wanted to make a first-person shooter including these elements?

A: So the original inspiration came from Ace of Spades. That was a huge game based around the boxel first-person shooter style. I loved that game as a kid. Grew up with Infiniminer, Minecraft, those boxel games. And when Ace of Spades got shut down, I thought, I didn’t want to lose that genre of game that so many people love. So I started working on Sector’s Edge. And the destruction is the main thing. That’s why we go with boxels. So that we can have an environment that you can predictably destroy and easily navigate.

You can go through and say like with a game like Battlefield it’s got destruction as well, but it’s limited to a point where once you’ve played a few games you know which bits you can destroy, how the maps usually going to end up. Whereas, we want it to be more dynamic than that. So with the building element, you see one part of the map get completely destroyed in one game, whereas on another map it’s completely reinforced, with a massive fortress around it, stairs leading up, sky bridges going across the map. It’s the fact that you never know what the enemy team is going to do. It keeps it refreshing, and that’s why building is a core part of the game.

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Q: Sector’s Edge refers to a fictional area in a story that takes place in deep space. What made you want to use that as your setting?

A: This was pretty much coming around trying to brand the game. The hardest part was trying to figure out the name for it. And we were thinking “what is the backstory?” “What are we really trying to do here?” And we didn’t want to be restricted by realism. So we set it in the distant future, at the very edge of the universe. So if you were to look one way, you would see complete pitch blackness, whereas you look the other way you see stars you see planets you see the universe as we know it.

So it’s all the way out here that’s pretty the much our own little ‘edge of the sector,’ which is what the name comes from. Where we can just create what we want to create. We’re doing everything ourselves. We’re not restricted by an engine. It’s just our part of the universe where we can just make something that’s fun to play.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQDbMnuLqHI

Q: You mention how you want this to be more casual. What differentiates Sector’s Edge from the other FPS games like you mentioned?

A: With games I’ve played in the past, I’ve seen the feedback from players on other games. It’s always, “add this… add that… we need more of this… this is cool when I feel like.” These are coming from the fact that the core game itself is lacking in areas. My brother and I are huge FPS fans. We know what can kill a game. With Sector’s Edge we are exploring the attachment system with weapons. Rather than having one weapon here and one weapon here, you can customize it to have a kind of weapon in-between that you want. And that can suit the play style that you want to play. And that ties back to having just the ability to not have it restricted in that way. If you want to play a certain way, you can, and you can do it reliably. You can get in and play how you want to play.

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Sector's Edge Renegade Elite

Q: What kind of feedback have you gotten so far from your players on the recently released beta?

A: The feedback is thankfully a lot different by comparison to our initial launch. Because we’ve pretty much taken all the old feedback, grabbed the things that were most important and really try to get it right this time. And because of that we are getting different feedback and the main feedback is around game modes and the load out system. Because the load out system is quite complicated; you can setup multiple guns within a load out and then within each gun you can setup multiple attachments, and then within each attachment like with a scope you can customize its crosshairs and their colors.

I guess because we’ve been acclimatized to it over time, with how everything works, it’s good to be able to see it from a fresh player’s perspective who’s never played the game before. And we never really got that in our lead-up to this update because all our beta crew were like diehard fans of the game. And so it’s kind of a shock whenever you release a new update and have so many new eyes on it. It’s like, “The load out system doesn’t make sense. What do I do in this game mode? How do I build?” So the feedback there has just been “Play the game to it’s full potential.” And I guess that’s on us because we haven’t shown everything you can do.

Q: What made you want to add the building element to a first-person shooter?

A: You can’t have destruction without building. If we just had destruction, that would be completely razed by the end of it. If you’re standing there behind a wall, an enemy shoots it, and suddenly you have no wall, you need to have an option to have that counter play. Because you don’t just want to have people with their nice little base setup and all of a sudden there are explosions come through and there are holes everywhere. If they don’t want to evacuate, they can rebuild and reinforce it where they want to; put holes in the wall where they want to be able to peak out of. So being able to build is your ability to create the vantage points.

You want to create from the position that you’re trying to make. You get together with a bunch of friends and say, “we’re going to make this complex base over here.” Try and hold it on this objective. So it kind of brings payers together, and also it’s a way to point back to before where if you want to make a massive fort. You can if you want to destroy it you can. You’ve got both options destruction versus construction.

sectors edge canyon

Q: In the game, you can build and customize your arsenal. In development, you and your brother built and customized your own engine to run this game. What was that like? Why build a custom engine yourself?

A: My brother and I are very similar. We always want to learn as much as we can. We had this thought at the beginning where, even if the game was a total flop, at least we didn’t just learn how to use Unity or how to download assets. 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. 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. I think that’s wat kept me interested. 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.

Same with Simon. He’s learned how to rig up models, how to animate them. He’s learned new software. He’s learned how to paint textures in Photoshop or create sky boxes in Terragen. The fact that we’re growing and learning so many new things is just what keeps it fresh for us is the reward.

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sectors edge ice station

Q: In addition to building your own game engine, there are servers setup for online play in 25 regions worldwide. How did you finance this?

A: Mainly personal. We haven’t had any external investors. So what we’ve done is pretty much worked full time for a year, took a gap year, worked full time, took a gap year. Sort of financed it in sprints – Save up as much as we can, burn through our savings, save up as much as we can, burn through our savings. That cycle going through whereas for the past year we’ve decided that we’re kind of getting burnt out just spending an entire year on it.

So we’ve gone back to our full-time work, and just spending a couple of hours after work each day on it. And we’ve figured out that we haven’t really stopped or slowed down that much because of it. So I guess that was a revelation for us, that we don’t have to go full-steam ahead all the time and burn ourselves out. Just going a bit slow is a lessons that we’ve learned.

Q: You finished the beta, and there are many videos on the YouTube channel. What’s it like for you to see your project come to fruition?

A: It’s a bit mind-boggling, the fact that we don’t look at it like a finished product. We look at it like, “I see a triangle there… I see the code for the UI here… Simon sees the animation model there.” I guess when you know every part of how you built something, you kind of think that it shouldn’t be possible that it can all work together in a final product. I guess the fact that it is and that people are enjoying it makes the entire process worth it. We’re always going to look at it and nitpick it, but we’re definitely proud of it. When we watch a trailer and get excited to play our own game, that’s when we know we’re on the right track and that we’re making something we can be proud of.

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sectors edge cold harbour

Q: If you could sum up the journey to create Sector's Edge in one word, what would it be and why?

A: Innovation – we love learning as much as we can. As we’ve gotten more experience with our skills, we’ve started to do things our own way. The main one would be with the Ray traced audio, we were thinking something that would be fun to experiment with just having more realistic audio in game that we haven’t heard before like in other games. So we made a custom ray tracing audio engine which casts rays outward from the player and figures out like 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.

What started as a tech experiment led up to something that was being really useful for our players. Like when we released our first demo, people were saying that it was the best audio they had heard in a first-person shooter. It’s just instinctual that they can know that a sound that’s muffled they don’t have to worry about, whereas gunfire that’s loud and clear they know that that’s an enemy that’s clear in their line of sight. As a user, form the user experience, from this tech, it’s not something we can look up online, it’s something we figured out ourselves and then have it have a positive impact for our players. That’s the stuff that we’re really passionate about.

[END]

The Sector's Edge Beta is free-to-play on Steam.

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