DRONE CORE COMMAND
A drone companion game where you command a responsive combat unit through hostile alien territory. Guide and strategize as you and your drone secure zones, adapt to threats, and carry out Command's escalating objectives. Drone Core Command is a short story gallery shooter designed for use with hand tracking.
Now Available in Early Access on the Meta Quest store!
Statement of Work
CONTEXT OF DEVELOPMENT
This game started as a viability study to better understand how simple hand gestures could be used to influence drone movement in a shooting-gallery style gameboard. Production involved using a variety of a.i. tools to ideate through concepts and rapidly build 3d models and functional prototypes all of which could be used in game. The game supports both touch controller and hand gestures and has been designed with this sort of parity in mind.
GAMEPLAY
The design of the core loop is a familiar concept that involves selecting a loadout based on mission intel, deploying to the battlefield for mission engagement, and returning to base to repair your drone, gather more intelligence, and upgrade both your drone and weapons arsenal.
NARRATIVE
Building Drone Core Command was an opportunity to tell a short story. From one perspective, one could look at this as a critical statement on the faceless nature of remote combat and humanity's general attachment and dependency on machines. Another narrative angle in the game is simply about corporate layoff culture. When the player is finished completing their command group's objectives, they are asked to leave the game in a manner of speaking.
FUTURE DEVELOPMENT
This game is being released as an early access product in hopes of getting feedback on the nature of hand tracking in this context and to provide players with the opportunity to help shape the experience with any feedback. See the Feature Dev Roadmap for a detailed list of what's in the works.
Mission Engagement
Operate your Corelink Weapon Rig with touch controllers or hand tracking to engage directly with the environment, or take control of your mech's targeting system.
Abstract Puzzle Repair Games
Complete a series of puzzles in the Repair Bay to fix your mech.
Unique & Intuitive Loadout HCI
Interact with Core Recalibration to customize your inventory and upgrade your weapons.
Complete Reconnaissance Missions
Play a top-down shooter mini-game in your HUB to earn credits toward weapon upgrades.
XR Gameplay
For players that like to bring games into their physical surrounds, Drone Core Command has an augmented gameplay mode in development.
Build Notes - June 17, 2026
Drone Core Command - Build 0.95
What's New:
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Added haptics
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First iteration of hit reacts with hostiles
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New method for opening your inventory
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UX adjustments for puzzle interaction
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Updated ground ops HUD when controlling the drone's targeting system
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Cleaned up some UI formatting
See the Feature Dev Roadmap For Additional News
As always, feel free to reach out with any thoughts or concerns, and thanks for checking out Drone Core Command!
Feature Dev Roadmap
The following is loose roadmap of what's in development for continued build-out of Drone Core Command:
Art & Animation
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Environment Detailing & Cleanup
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Vert reduction
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Recon ships are kit-bashed, but I'm starting to sketch out new designs to build from scratch
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The custom mech skins are in need another art pass to increase model fidelity, improve textures, and help with readability when deployed in the field of play
Design
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Recon runs could use more variation and obstacles. There is a method to the madness here, and there will be more meaning to engaging with hostiles in the recon game in an upcoming build. For now I just want to make sure steering feels right with controllers and hand tracking.
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System balancing for progression
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Puzzle design could be improved. It's sort of monotonous at the moment, and i'm looking to build more granularity and variance into this to really take advantage of hand tracking and 'pinch' movements.
UX/UI
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Ambidextrous gameplay
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Map selection and mech skin selection need some timers built in to prevent accidental input
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Placing vitals closer to the ships field of view in a recon run
VFX & Destructibles
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Most translucency has been removed from the game, but there are still a few effects that are using it and need to be updated
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Because destructibles are cached, I need to re-align the playback now that environments have gone through an optimization pass
Engineering
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A few more actors need to be pooled to smooth out some hitches
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Continued optimizations
Audio
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Soundtracks in the game are off the shelf. I'm looking to build more custom soundtracks for the various gamestates outside of typical gameplay
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Most sound fx are off the shelf too for the most part. Would love to customize these as well. Slowly i've been going through and iterating sound fx, but it's lower on the priority list at the moment
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I can probably continue to compress some audio that's less important to help with optimizations
Narrative
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While the story is brief, I feel it's not really pulling it's weight with the message I want the game to tell. This has been a challenging process in general as I'm trying to tell the story in about 9 paragraphs (one per level) from the antagonists, and another 9 paragraphs from the protagonists. So this will continue to evolve before coming out of early access.
A.I.
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The EQS is performing pretty well at the moment, but there are still some cases where enemies can get stuck, or the player's mech ends up in unexpected places.
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The mech's attack logic can sometime bug out with rotational calculations and spin erratically when attempting to find it's target
Marketing
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The trailers and videos in this web presence need to be updated to reflect the latest state of the game
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In the process of completing the various tasks on this roadmap, I make an effort to create a social media post that aligns with whatever task has been completed. It's not always an easy thing to get done in the grand scheme of things and given its time consuming nature. However, it's a good measure of screen presence, market feedback, and the endless effort of building an audience.