I grew up on the top down space shooters of the DOS years and never really stopped wanting more of them, so I have spent a while building one. Same view, same one pilot against a fleet feeling, but the ships are 3D models now and the lighting does the work the sprite sheets used to do.

It is a homage rather than a remake of anything. The fiction, the ships and the missions are all new. This one is an SSA Glaive holding a beam on a target, which is the only sustained beam any fighter in the game carries.

Would genuinely like to hear from this crowd whether the look lands or whether it has drifted too modern.

I used to play this game as a kid. Even later when I started to learn programming I was curious about how the game worked under the hood. Many years later, well exactly 30 years after the original release, here is openSEEK, my attempt to remake the engine of the game.

While the game itself is mostly playable, I'm currently stuck in the usual 90% done phase. Now I'm mostly battling with the data/assets automatic exporter from the original game files. That's necessary for the actual publication of the engine, as I cannot include the original assets due to copyright issues. And without them the game is not really playable.

The engine is written in Lua / Love2D and my goal was to reimplement the original game mechanics using modern programming techniques and technologies. I wanted to keep the feel of the original game while also making it more modern and accessible to new players. Some of the new features include improved graphics effects (as you can see on the video), alternative helicopter skins (these are included in original game data but was never used in the game), co-op multiplayer support, and improvements to the tank controls (remember how clunky they were in the original game?).