Rescoping

Hi!

When I originally thought of this game in my head I wanted it to be a multiplayer game, where players could set up their own servers with custom configs and so on. I already developed a multiplayer game (a remake of an older 4X-strategy browser game), and the main take-away I got from it was that multiplayer games only work when there are enough players to play against, and getting a healthy player base does not seem achievable at all to me. I am only doing game dev as a hobby, and this creating multiplayer games just for the sake of it does not seem appealing to me anymore.

So I decided to rescope Drone Control to be a singleplayer game with a more designed approach. When I was creating a new game mode for my other game I had a lot of fun with it since the game mode is basically a wave defense mode, which you can actually just play alone. This kind of game design was much more fun to me.

Since it should still be a 3D space shooter, I want to avoid the aspects of games like Freelancer (which was an inspiration) that bored me personally, especially the long stretches of just traveling from A to B. But 100% space combat all the time also seems like a bad idea, so I decided to mix some strategy elements to it.

So the new concept of Drone Control will be that players can play through crafted missions. The goal of each mission will probably be to survive all enemy attacks with at least one drone surviving. Drones now mine minerals from asteroids and those minerals can be used to build stuff like a defense turret and so on. The player can spawn on the drones - he will in fact replace them, so constant dying will lead to less income since you have to replace your drones at some point or you won't be able to build anything anymore.

The currently playable version has only one mission in it, basically the first part of the tutorial. I want a good new-player-experience from the start so I can get valuable feedback every time I add a new mission - so new players always have a place to get familiar with the game systems.

Let's see where this takes me :)