ABOUT
Somebody usually asks who made a thing and why. This is that page.
Fifteen Years
I have wanted to make a game for fifteen years.
Twelve of those years I was in the Army. I was also a father, and I ran a business I started from nothing in 2010 until I sold it. No stretch of time ever belonged to me. That is why I never learned to code. There was never a year where I could sit down for six months with a programming language.
I am a disabled veteran now. What I have is time, and one idea I have carried since I was a kid.
The business repaired and replaced things for a living. Years of pulling apart what was broken and working out what was worth keeping and what got thrown out. I did not notice how much that shaped this game until it was mostly built.
How It Gets Built
AI coding tools are the reason this game exists instead of staying an idea. I would rather say that myself than have somebody find it.
Here is exactly what AI did and did not do.
Code. Written with AI coding tools.
Art. Every ship, station and planet is rendered in code, with no AI images.
Music. The soundtrack was made with Suno, an AI music tool, directed by me. It ships as fixed audio files.
Sound effects. A licensed library from Ocular Sounds, chosen, cut and tuned by me.
Story. The story comes from me. AI helped turn it into text, tidy it up and translate the store page.
While you play. Nothing is generated by AI. The enemy machines were trained offline, and nothing learns while you play.
Here is the part that is mine. Every system in this game. The flight model, the heat, the salvage, the docking, the way a heavy mount trades tracking speed for damage, the rule that nothing instant should be worth anything. All of it came out of my head and got argued with until it worked.
The build log is nineteen chapters long and walks through every system and why it works the way it does. Every idea in it is mine. AI helped turn it into text and tidy it up.
What I did not have was the skill to write the code, or the years to learn it. The tools close that gap. How the enemy machines are trained and tested is on the MACHINES page.
The 713th
I served with the 713th Engineer Company. Route clearance, Kandahar. We found bombs in roads so that everybody behind us did not have to.
All three starter hulls are named for route clearance trucks. GT523 is the gun truck. BUFFALO is the one with the arm that reached into the ground ahead of everybody. HUSKY MKIII is the truck I drove. They are named for the trucks, and for the men who were in them.
Their names are on the frame panels in the game. GT523 was a real truck.
Credits
The credits live on the crew page. The playtest crew who flew it early and told me what was wrong with it, the fixes they found, and the credits for the music, the sound, the art and the code.
Contact
Press, streamers, whoever. salvoradrift@gmail.com
facebook.com/SalvorAdrift
instagram.com/salvoradrift
discord.gg/WMGMsbue4y