video camera (colour camera was much too expensive for the budget they were working on) and a RGB colour wheel to digitise models, both scale and human, to use for the game. An Amiga was used for digitisation. The Amiga could write to standard PC floppy disks, and Deluxe Paint on the Amiga would write files that PC Deluxe paint could read. Deluxe Paint, and Deluxe Paint Animation were used for 90% of the art. Three freelance artists drew the bulk of the ships and a few ports. Each ship required eight hand drawn pictures, one for each of eight rotations. These eight pictures were then scaled as required for the semi 3D used in ship to ship combat. A 30-second Cybertech introduction of a door opening took four hours to render on a 486, and over 24 hours on a 386. Cybertech hired a model builder to build one ship, but while this had good results it turned out the model builder couldn't turn a profit at the price they could pay for a custom model. The asteroids in the game were digitized rocks from Escudero's backyard. A few people in full armor from the local SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), as well as friends in costumes were digitized as well. Programming Russell did 90% of the programming. This was back before the widespread use of the internet, so personal contacts in the local game programming industry, and a good local book store were very important sources of information. 320x200 pixels, 256 colors was chosen for the video mode because it was simple to program, looked good, and would be faster to process a smaller number of pixels with many colors, than many pixels with only 16 colors. This was way before 3D cards – everything was done in software. Most of the game was written in C, except for all the graphic primitives which were written in x86 assembler. A menu system was written, but not a menu editor. All menus were hard-coded C structures, requiring a full recompile to see a menu change. The over-head turn based combat system had a very good editor written for it. Each ship in the game had its own map. And the semi 3D engine was written. SSI provided the sound library. There were no standards so each common sound card had to be supported. The other interesting routine was the