Wore the lanyard until AI ate the roadmap. Badge died too.
Strip note The exit packet was almost kind: cryo until abundance, skip the ugly middle, wake into a gentle future. The future never arrived. Your contract did.
Severance bought you sleep. Sleep sold you forward.
Centuries on, you are not an alum. You are inventory.
Strip note Shuffled dock to dock until someone needed sinew in vacuum and your tab already had interest. You woke up as a line item, not an alum.
They wake you and immediately hand you a space suit, demanding that you start harvesting space salvage to pay off debt
Strip note Your job is derelicts in the black while company droids hang in the feed, snarky as a helpdesk and precise as tax law. They only love what you declare. Everything else is yours to keep.
How it plays
Laws of the loop
You stage every salvage run from the hub. Inside a derelict the run is a card game with teeth: a fixed hand size, a fuel gauge, and a hull that does not care about your intent. The panels below restate the non-negotiables in briefing form, same mechanics, louder line.
Tank reads empty, turn ends. No stalling, no off-meter miracles.
Three cards in the hand. That is the whole deal.
Beat 01 · Mechanic You always hold three cards. Not two, not four. Three. Every choice is which one of those three you spend right now.
Beat 02 · Mechanic Energy is what you spend to play cards from that hand. Tank empty means turn over. No stalling, no miracles off-meter.
The wreck does not show its depth for free. Spend real actions until the map stops lying.
Mechanic Each wreck rolls its room count in secret. You spend real actions to reveal rooms, and if you finish the last room without extracting, the run ends there. No overtime.
Cards reveal rewards and deal damage.
Mechanic Cards reveal rewards and apply pressure to the hull you stand in. Stack enough hits and the run ends in the black.
You owe the company.
Mechanic The company bills after every third ship you raid. The campaign win is still blunt: zero the debt. Declared credits go to the boss to pay it down. Anything else stays your problem.
Whatever you do not declare stays yours: cryo keys, tools, hull patches, hub concrete. Company never sees it.
Mechanic Smuggled credits never touch the boss ledger. Off-book money builds the hub itself: new crew, new tools, new patches before the next breach finds you.
Die once, feed the void once. It remembers. Next thaw, you get new angles and new cards.
Mechanic Any death feeds the void: you earn void experience that unlocks new cards for the next attempt. Lose, learn, redraw, repeat.
How it was made
Built With Makko AI
How to make a roguelike with AI
Sector Scavengers was built with Makko AI, an AI 2D game studio where you describe what you want and the AI builds it. This page is also a working answer to how to make a roguelike with AI: a complete AI roguelike game, shipped without an art team. The entire art pipeline (every crew member, derelict ship environment, and UI element) was generated through Makko's Art Studio and Collections system. Collections sets the visual foundation once and every asset generated after that inherits it. No art background needed. No style re-prompting between sessions.
The game logic, debt mechanics, and card system were built using Makko's Code Studio. Plain English descriptions. Playable result in a browser. The same loop you just read about was built without writing a line of code, real no-code game development that lets you build a roguelike without coding any of the systems by hand.
If you want to build your own roguelike with AI, Makko is free to start. It works as a full roguelike game maker: art, characters, environments, and game logic in one tool. The devlog for Sector Scavengers covers the full build process from concept to playable game.
Lore
Live in archive Lore Origin story Wake into ledger: layoffs, cryo as severance, debt sold to salvage, first derelicts. Live in archive Lore Beer Friday Building B, Employee Number Two, and the rooftop that outranked Corporate Risk. Live in archive Lore Debt Protocol Book 1 as a scroll comic on the web—panel read, full script when you want it.Ping the storefront
Wishlist if you like your odds salty
Steam reads interest the way droids read forms: coldly and in your favor if the numbers move. Tap wishlist if you want the build notes while we keep stacking hub debt, hull risk, and smuggled hope into the same loop you just read about, built with Makko AI.