Robinson spoke with Game Rant about how Vericidium created Sector’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 of first-person shooters, Robinson wants to keep the casual gameplay spirit alive.
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The Innovative Systems Behind Sector’s Edge
Sector’s Edge is 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.” They created their own programming engine using C# and OpenGL to have complete control over every aspect of the game, including networking, rendering, input, UI, collision detection, animations, and more.
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 unique weapon attachment system was developed in hopes of simplifying the player’s options.
“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.” Inspired by titles such as Battlefield and Ace 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 for Sector’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 custom ray tracing audio engine which 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.
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 of Sector’s Edge has not yet been announced, feedback from players on the beta is 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 can do [yet],” Robinson said.
The Sector’s Edge Beta is free-to-play on Steam.
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