Experience a sci‑fi VR gallery shooter where you command a responsive combat mech through hostile alien territory, blending action, strategy, and puzzle‑based upgrades. With support for both hand tracking and VR controllers, customize your load out with human-engineered firepower or take control of your mech’s targeting system. Fly reconnaissance runs to evolve your weaponry and gain powerful advantages during your ground operations.
Nine multi-state levels
Reconnaissance runs in the form of a VR top down shooter
A weapon recalibration system known as a Corelink Weapon Rig
Puzzles that are solved with pinching, pulling, popping and welding
Defensive skill trees
Five unique mech skins
So what exactly is Drone Core Command?
Think of Drone Core Command as a tower defense game in VR. Except your tower moves around … and is a mech .. that can launch air strikes. The goal of the game is to keep your mech alive during each level as you take out the source of enemy movement. You can use something called your Corelink Weapon Rig to either directly engage with enemies or take control of your mech’s weapon system to do the same. If your mech dies, you die … or return to your base at least, so you can repair your mech.
And that’s what repair puzzles do. They restore health to your mech and grant you repair credits so you can fill out your defensive skill tree as you progress through the game.
Any strategy involved?
Core Recalibration is where the strategy comes into play. You change your loadout by assigning new behaviors to the cores that are loaded into your gun. Based on the obstacles found in ground operations, some loadout configurations will be more effective than others. For example, levels with cliff-based overhangs may protect a spawn structure from your mortar fire, forcing you to select a more direct line of sight approach like a rail-gun.
What if I get annihilated in the ground operations?
That’s where reconnaissance runs come into play. The top-down shooter built into the hub is a mini-game where players can earn reconnaissance credits to upgrade their loadouts as well as perks for ground operations like explosive attacks and amplified defenses to name a couple. The way you play out the reconnaissance run impacts the perk you get for ground operations.
Ok, so it’s part shooter, part tower defense. You got a story?
Yes, and no…well sort of .. but that’s the point. In fact, the story is a little “trope-ish” in that sense. You’re being asked to acquire territories at the request of your command group with little to no information as to why you’re doing it. They simply ask for results, dismiss you upon receiving said results, and with increasingly ambiguous verbiage. Not only do they dismiss you, but they ask you to leave the game when all is said and done. Whether or not you choose to stay ultimately changes the nature of the game.
And now for the elephant in the room a personal note.
The game dev industry is evolving quickly yet again, and this time with AI generated content. It now takes a lot less to make a lot more. And when it takes a lot less, studios tend to reduce staff sizes. So I had some time on my hands. Drone Core Command started as an idea and prototype for a VR competition, the hypothesis of which was two-fold. First, I was interested in seeing where VR dev tools were these days, and wanted to test something that used only hand tracking since a lot of investment was shifting over to XR wearables. Second, I wanted to see where AI generated content worked and where it fell short.. So that’s where I put my time.
Controllers? We don’t need no stinking controllers!
Designing a game with no controllers meant no buttons. And no buttons meant no precision … or haptics for that matter. Much of how I designed this game, keeping parity between controllers and hand-tracking in mind, was very much about how to mitigate the challenges of input derived from a very imprecise interpretation of hand movement. Pulling a trigger with nothing in one’s hand can be a pretty awkward muscle movement. Making a fist is not. But there is some jitter when making a fist, so every weapon core that can be equipped has some form of warm-up where a player can adjust their aim once their hand has completed the bulk of its muscle movement. All of the weapons also have some splash damage to account for residual muscle movement. Furthermore, the interface for the game is diegetic for the most part. Instead of pressing buttons, the player is required to make some sort of virtual mechanical movement to activate something. While the real-world gesture itself is not recognized, the mechanical device in-game responds as expected to provide the player with what I hope to be their expected feedback.
I don’t always use Ai, but when I do…
The use of AI seems to be under a lot of scrutiny in the industry at the time of this writing. I wanted to know why, so I tried to use it everywhere I thought was plausible in the interest of better understanding this “threatening technological abhorrence” (whilst making a game about a soldier that depended heavily on an AI driven mech to fulfill Command’s every ask).
I used AI generated content to quickly iterate through 2d concept art. Rarely did it come up with exactly what I was looking for, but it certainly expedited the process.
I could then throw these concepts into an AI mesh generating platform receiving pretty much the same results: couldn’t use the exact mesh that was generated, but it certainly created the base mesh upon which I could continue to sculpt, refine, or paint depending on the task at hand, and depending on its focus on the game.
I found it incredibly useful for voiceovers and sound fx, but still needed to process everything in audio post-production software. That being said, much of the audio in the game outside of voice overs is off-the-shelf for the time being.
Rapid iteration with narrative exploration was a big success. AI didn’t generate the story for me, but it could put dialogue into thematic forms that I could then iterate on.
Last but not least, I could bring some concepts to life for marketing purposes with AI video generated content. However, I had a lot of issues steering AI through the process of trying to figure out how quadrupeds worked (in the case of the mech).
So that’s the premise of this VR experience. Don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or feedback. Drone Core Command has been an enjoyable game to build, and I hope you have fun playing it!