The Evolution of the Drone
It's typical in this genre to have six weapons that you wield at once, and originally, NIMRODS was the same way; you'd have six guns that you could switch between by pressing the numbers 1 to 6 or by using the scroll wheel. Every time you bought an augment or tuning, you could choose which of the six guns to put it on. The first "iteration" of the Drone system was the "AI Control" tuning: With it, a gun would shoot itself while it wasn't equipped, with the fire speed much slower but increasing for every copy of the AI Control tuning you took. With enough copies, you'd be able to fire one gun while having the other five all be AI controlled, firing at full speed, leading to a massive barrage of death.
There was just one problem.
Six guns? In NIMRODS? No, seriously, think about it. There would be way too much going on on the screen at once. If you think picking augments is tough now, try also having to also determine which gun to put an augment on while keeping track of six simultaneous builds! Imagine how many times you'd have to level up to complete all your guns! (Or, conversely, imagine leveling up the same number of times as you do now, but only having each gun have one-sixth as many upgrades.) And finally, imagine how insanely tanky the enemies would have to be to not melt instantly under the combined assaults of six auto-firing weapons. There's a time to follow genre conventions and a time to forge your own path, and we knew that for NIMRODS, only having one gun at a time made sense.
Just One Gun To Build
What if you had multiple guns, but only built one gun at a time? The other guns would come from prior missions that you'd done earlier. That would make it so that you could focus on building only one gun, so you handle only one set of augments and level-ups. This decision would lead to the deep gun crafting system we have today, which would have been impossible if you tried to do it with six guns at once! After a few funny prototype builds where we had a halo of five drones orbiting the player simultaneously, we realized that to make the players feel like their decisions mattered and that they weren't outclassed by their armies of drones, we could only give a player one drone per run. This led to the buddy system we've got now..
An obvious problem that cropped up was how to keep things balanced when you have a drone partner using your old gun. If your gun was at the same strength it was when you originally used it, then it would annihilate the enemies early game and make the game unfun by completely outclassing you, only to fall off late game as your new weapon grew to a higher level than your drone and left it in the dust.
We tried a few different ways of fixing these ideas. For a while, we had your drone be an activated ability you could use. It would cause a full-powered drone to come out of nowhere to wipe the screen for you before flying off again, content to chill until its cooldown elapsed and it could swoop in for another heroic rescue. Problem was that people would keep forgetting they even had it! For a while, we tried not having a drone at all. (It was a dark time.) Finally, we decided that leaving such a unique feature on the table instead of solving its problems was a bit of a waste.
The Modern Drone
It took a while, but eventually, we settled on our current drone. For those of you unaware of the specifics, in NIMRODS, you take guns home with you when you finish a mission. Giving that gun to your drone to take with it on the next mission turns that drone into a "ghost" of your former run, similar to how the ghosts in racing games work. Your drone will start off wielding a base chassis, but it would take all the augments and tunings that you did when building it, in the order that you took them. This was better than our previous solution, which was to have your drones' level up in lockstep with you; it made it so that leveling up fast made for better drones than leveling up slowly. We were a little concerned that it would be confusing to players to place their super amazing level 30 gun on a drone only to have that drone use a pistol at the start of the game, but from what we can tell from feedback, you guys all catch on to the idea pretty fast, and tend to like your drone companions, so it all worked out!
Drones of the Future
So, what's next for drones? What's this new Drone Bay System we’re teasing today?
We want players to be able to customize their drones even further and expand their usefulness. For instance, there are some augments that don't work well on drones. For instance, you know the Terra Cannon Mount, which stuns enemies when you use a character ability? That would be useless on drones because they have no character abilities, right?
Well what if we give them one?
Drone can teleport to its destination. Triggers the "On using a Character Ability" effects from its augments.
Or how abilities that trigger when you get hit, like the Energetically Dissuasive Barrel? Those are useless because your drone can't get hit, right?
Well what if they could?
Press LSHIFT to lower your Drone near the ground. It agains an HP bar, and enemies will target and damage the Drone. It will fly back up, becoming invulnerable again, before dying.
Or what about the Enchanted Bayonet? It hits nearby enemies, but the drone almost never floats over a group of enemies, right?
Well what if it did?
Drone leaps towards your Crosshair with a certain Max Speed
The goal for the Drone Bay is to make it so that as many augments as possible are viable on the drone if you set your drone up correctly. There are three main features of the drone bay: The Targeting selector, where you can customize what you want your drone to shoot and what targets it should pick, the movement selector, where you can customize how you want your drone to move, and the list of special features, which you can toggle on and off to give your drone abilities to make use of certain augments that currently don't have a place on the drone right now. Each of these three options can be unlocked by talking to a special NPC near the drone bay who will sell you drone upgrades.
Our hope is that this will bring even more energy and customization into the drone mechanic. We've already seen in our Discord that people are already going out of their way to build drones with cool setups to help support them in their runs, such AoE drones to assist single target builds that struggle with crowds, credit and research drones that stack augments that give drop chance to make farming easier, and bubble drones players can hide beside as they spray death all over the screen with their primary weapon. We hope to see these sorts of "custom built" drones explode in abundance and variety as people start to take advantage of all the new options drones can gain!
Do you have a favorite augment that is "useless" on a drone? Want to see it finally shine while equipped to your mechanical companion? Leave us a comment here or come to our Discord and let us know, and we'll see what we can do to make sure the drone bay system will support its use! As always, we're open to comments and feedback!
Best of luck, NIMRODS!