Games Drone Swarm: A game where you control 32,000 drones in space

Drone Swarm



Control a swarm of 32,000 drones in this strategy-adventure set in space! Jump from system to system and battle powerful alien fleets on your campaign to find New Earth. Destroy enemy vessels, slam them into one another, block attacks and outsmart defenses. When the battle is over, salvage enemy technologies to upgrade the swarm and add new abilities. Only by combining all of them will you stand a chance.

Genre: Fast paced strategy adventure
Release: End of 2020
Steam Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/401760/Drone_Swarm/
Completion Status: About 80%

Trailer

GIFs

https://i.imgur.com/SFX1VFb.gif
https://i.imgur.com/rNAqYkU.gif

About Us

Hey all, I'm Chris from stillalive studios. We'be been here a long time ago with our first game Son of Nor (https://forum.unity.com/threads/son-of-nor-action-rpg.126585/) in 2012-2015. We've been working on other games in the meantime but have always had some side projects we developed on our own. Like Drone Swarm, which we have been working on for the past 5 years (on and off).

From a team perspective, we have 1 game designer, 2 programmers, 1 UI/UX guy, 2 artists, 1 tech artist, 1 game director, and a bit of me doing sound design, working on the project.

We're happy talking a bit about the game, development process and sharing development progress here on our way to release, which we hope to be end of 2020.

It's developed with Unity, where we changed the base tech for the drone simulation several times (from GPU shaders back to CPU) and worked really hard on the control scheme to make controlling the swarm feel natural and fun (I don't know how many playtests we did and fairs we visited, but there were a LOT).

We also have playtests from time to time. If you're interested, I'll post more info here. If you have questions, shoot away.

 

Woah, that looks good!
The swarms of drones remind me so much of the Sentinels in The Matrix. I think that's a cool concept.

When you write that it's 70% done, what does that mean? What's left?
How does the system work? Is it a progression level by level (fight-upgrade-fight-upgrade...), or is there a story with some exploration with resource gathering?

 

Hey munchou! Thanks for the kind words.

And a hard concept. The game started as a tech demo and we struggled a lot with the controlling scheme. Do we do classical RTS point and click? We had "swarm points" you could create and drones would fly there. But we now settled on gestures where you paint your patch and select an ability the swarm has to execute. This is how the game is played.

Well, we have most of the programming done. All swarm abilities, upgrades are there. We have the ship models and weapons. We're working heavily on the UI so the "upgrading the swarm" works well and players know what that means and what advantages you get when you do it. We have the story mostly developed, all the voice-overs and decisions you do in the game. What's missing the most is later gameplay, audio and voice-overs.

We have lots of ideas for encounters, destroy all ships being the most obvious one. But also protect something, escape something, we have gas clouds that do damage or disable your drones, the ships you fight have different tech installed, like shields, different weapons and you always need to find out how you best win a fight. Example: If the enemy has a shield, you cannot just attack with the swarm from the front. You could go around. You could disable the shield. You could install an ability that allows a different attack etc. But scaling that content to later levels, setting up all the encounters is, where we're at at the moment.

It is a progression level by level, you're right in that. So you set out to find a new planet earth for humanity to settle on. You go into a system and something happens. You meet a race that is hostile towards you and attacks. You fight, encounters last about 2-10 minutes. Then you jump to the next system in search of New Earth. This is also how the story unfolds. You cannot jump to any system, only to nearby systems your scanners pick up.
During battles, you passively gather resources and tech you can research. With research, you can install upgrades and you need resources for that. Upgrades can be to your mothership or to the swarm and the upgrades help you be stronger in fights.

What do you think?
As we get closer to our intended release, we also need to invest some time in marketing, going on streams, showing the game off. We already do that but since the game is in development for 5 years, it's a bit hard keeping up the momentum. We had a good thing going 2018, when we were at gamescom in Cologne, but after 2 years, people moved on and it's hard getting them back But we're still here, working on it!

 

Hi Chris, thank you for the thorough reply!

It's always interesting to read.

Yea, I hope it's not only fighting, as it may kill the fun after a while (seeing the map in the trailer, it seems there is a bunch of levels already!).

About the marketing, I'm not qualified to tell you what to do.
Having some well-known YouTube gamers from several country (not only English-speaking) preview/review the game is a good way to reach a large audience, I think. The risk is that if the game sucks, well...
That type of game is quite particular, unlike FPS and some of their hypes that reach millions (?) of gamers, but it has the merit to exist, and after watching the trailer, it looks promising to me. I'd love to test it, and buy it depending on its price, content, and its length (one cannot ask 20 bucks for a game that takes 6 hours to beat whereas there are some others that are way longer and as/more fun for the same price (hello Oddworld). Some short AAA are an exception, but they got bashed anyway... (What? Who said EA? )

I look forward to seeing more, that's a nice project!

 

Your game looks really cool! Good luck with your project!

 

Lots of stuff happened in the last weeks.

• We onboarded a technical game designer: He's looking over the whole structure of the game. Levels, succession, what weapon and upgrade is introduced when, and already did lots of changes that made the game both more challenging but also more fun.
• We integrated many new sound effects (we're using FMOD for that).
• We're polishing encounters, weapons, ships, behaviours...
• We recorded the complete voice-over for the game in English with our studio partner Rain Productions. Recording sessions were 3 days in total and exhausting. We're not happy with one of the voices even though from the demo snippets it sounded good. We'll likely record that role again with somebody we know in a private studio.
• Gamescom in Cologne is coming. Everybody is full steam ahead, squashing bugs, polishing content, effects, sounds, UI... and we're doing a new trailer coming next week. Will link to it next week when it's released.
• We did some social media snippets to explain single aspects of the game. The snippets are designed to be super small and digestible when you wait for the bus. Or you are in the bus.

Here's the first snippet where I explain what Drone Swarm in essence is about.

Being a bit older I personally have to get used to a square format. It looks weird in the browser on a computer. But because this is primarily for social media, it is for consumption on a mobile phone. And there square works very well.

 

Looks really interesting. How destructible are the drones? In the video the drones are used as a shield. Enemy projectiles while having a huge explosion effect don't seem to reduce the number of drones all that much (if at all? hard to tell)

 

All 32k drones are individually simulated. We have put some care into makit it matter where the drones are, how they behave. A normal drone shield protects from rockets and lasers. But asteroids and ships may pass through (pushing drones aside). Later there are wall-busting torpedos that disable part of the shield-drones for a certain amount of time. But only around the explosion radius.
Lasers from enemies, if they hit the swarm that's not in a shield formation, kills drones. Slowly of course, but there are individual explosions and the count goes down. The swarm around the mothership is the only thing protecting the mothership. The mothership itself is very weak. So you have to pay attention at all times, making walls in strategic places and leave enough drones for attack patterns.
There will be videos coming next week where some of this stuff is explained and I think we have some scenes where you also see drones exploding.

 

In our second short clip we talk about basic abilities the swarm has.

Unlike in traditional strategy games where you command units that have their advantages and disadvantages (heavily shielded but slow, quick but low firepower) the swarm is fluid and can take on many forms. The power comes from combining the abilities of the swarm. Using it as shield in one area, attacking with it somewhere else.

In the game you'll also get upgrades to the swarm that enable more powerful attacks, attack combinations or special abilities. We'll talk about some of them in later videos.

 

This week would be gamescom in Cologne, but it all takes place virtually. For that we have a new trailer with an epic voice. We love our work but we also have fun and don't take ourselves too seriously (it only affects well-being).

So this week, apart from the new trailer, we announced that you can pre-order Drone Swarm, and also there's a free demo version where you can try the swarm on your own!

 

Hi Chris, did you use ECS-DOTS and the Burst compiler to achieve these results?

 

Hey. We used the job system of DOTS and yes, the burst compiler. Exactly!