Dradis Windows game

Hello everybody,

welcome to the first devblog entry for Dradis. I'm not a professional writer, and I've not written in depth about any subject since high school, so do please bear with me and forgive my terrible writing!

Dradis was inspired by my love of space games in general, but particularly when I noticed that most space related games treat space combat as WW2 naval combat in space, with none of the scale and power that vacuum-based combat would (I imagine) involve.

I'd like to say starting out, I'm not married to anything like "total realism", I want this to be a fun and engaging experience. Where realism makes this more fun, I'll keep it. Where it is boring, breaks gameplay or wastes players time, I'll dump it!

I want players to not just enjoy popping bad guys, but to feel like they outwitted, outmanuvered or outgunned their opponent. Thats where the command console comes in. Everything you do in Dradis is controlled via the keyboard, changing direction and speed, charging weapons and modules, launching drones, setting nav points, everything. This has the effect of making every action a careful choice and really creates a feeling of immersion and tactical thinking.

I'm a _huge_ fan of "Duskers" and their command line interface, so I'll go ahead and admit I've shamelessly emulated alot of the features they have. Mainly because they are so cool, but also because they are the sort of thing you would expect to see in a real-life command line console.

Currently the main focus of development is to get a working beta build, combat is feeling good, although I need more weapons, more enemies and more environments.

The main game (currently) runs like so - you start in a system with X amount of planets - you will start owning 1 of those planets. You gather metal by mining or in combat with the enemy, metal is exchanged at friendly stations for energy which you then use for upgrades and new items. If you die, you will respawn at the nearest friendly planet after a deduction of energy.

Once you are strong enough, you can start to attack enemy planets. Enemy stations can be captured once you have eliminated all the enemies guarding the planet. The enemy will also attack your planets, if you lost all your planets, you will have no where to respawn and your next death will be permanent.

Phew, ok that's a lot of writing. I need to go lie down for a bit. Thanks to everyone for reading, expect the next devblog in the coming weeks!

Ross.