The new demo has a more focused mission structure, built around the new player experience.
Instead of opening with the full weapon and ammo selection systems, the demo gives a pre-defined loadout and puts the focus on the in-mission gameplay. Scout the area, blow up enemy armor, destroy objectives, counter the anti-air, guide your ground squads, capture the objectives and extract to safety.
I'm also experimenting more with staged objective flow. Your squads first need to capture enemy intel. Based on that, you’ll learn where the main resources are hidden. Once the resources are secured, you can extract. This flow is only meant to exist for some missions in the main game. It is harder to pre-plan without knowing all the objectives ahead of time. But it can also add excitement.
Finally, Drone Sector has a proper tutorial mission, with on-screen instructions and voice lines!
The biggest focus is explaining the game’s two main modes:
Fire Support Mode is used for firing weapons.
Command Mode is used for controlling squads.
Earlier versions expected players to figure out this switching on their own. It was one of the most common sources of confusion. Drone Sector is not just about firing from the sky. A lot of the game is about commanding the ground troops and capturing objectives too.
The tutorial now introduces that structure more clearly before sending players into the demo missions.
The squad move order queue is back! This makes it easier to plan a squad’s route through several positions, instead of constantly adjusting their movement one step at a time. It was removed for a while to keep the code complexity lower. I always wanted to bring it back, and now that the game is in a much more stable state, it’s a good time to do that.
Controls:
Shift + Left Mouse Button - Add another move order to the queue.
Shift + Right Mouse Button - Remove the latest queued move order.
Controller support for queued orders is still planned. Drone Sector already uses quite a few controls, so some controller interactions need more careful design instead of simply being mapped directly from keyboard and mouse.
For the demo, keyboard and mouse is still the recommended way to play.
The new demo is available now.
If you try it, I’d be happy to hear what you think, especially about the tutorial, mission flow, and squad controls. Feedback from earlier builds has already helped shape this version a lot.
And if Drone Sector seems interesting, wishlisting the game also helps a lot.
Ingmar Trump