What to expect from Drone Sector at Early Access launch

Drone Sector launches into Early Access on July 21.

I wanted to make this post mostly as a practical overview of what will be included in the Early Access version at launch. The demo showed the core shooting and battlefield support gameplay, but it hasn’t showcased the larger structure around it.

The game's price will be $16.99 with a 10% discount on launch. Keep in mind that this price might vary depending on Steam region.

What the demo showed

The demo focused on getting players into missions quickly. It showed the core gunship gameplay. Spotting enemies, providing fire support, guiding ground squads and dealing with anti-air threats.

What Early Access adds

The biggest addition is Career Mode. Instead of playing standalone missions, you move from mission to mission while carrying consequences forward. Ammo storage matters. Resources matter. Drone damage persists, but can be repaired. Research and manufacturing give you new options over time.

A single mission can often be won by spending heavily, taking damage, and accepting losses. Career Mode is more about whether you can keep surviving that way mission after mission.

Career Mode also includes difficulty options, so players can choose a version of the campaign that fits how punishing they want that longer-term pressure to be.

Maps, missions, loadouts

At launch, the Early Access version includes 10 maps. One smaller 1 km x 1 km map, and nine larger 3 km x 3 km maps.

There are more mission types than in the demo. Some missions are simple and only require completing any objective before extracting. Some are staged missions where capture objectives are revealed one after another. Others require you to search through several possible objectives without immediately knowing which ones are the correct ones.

Maps are hand-crafted, mission types are authored. The mission system procedurally generates different mission setups onto those maps.

There are also more weapons and ammo options than the demo showed. Loadout customization lets you choose weapons, assign up to two ammo slots per weapon, and decide the ammo ratio between them. In Career Mode, ammo also ties into manufacturing and stockpiles.

Sandbox Mode

Sandbox Mode lets you set up custom missions without the longer-term pressure of Career Mode. You can choose the map, mission type, objective counts, randomization seed, enemy unit counts by type, starting position, and extra toggles like infinite ammo and friendly fire.

This is useful if you want to experiment, test different situations, or just set up the kind of battle you want to play.

What is still being worked on

I want to be honest about this part.

AI behavior and squad behavior are still the biggest ongoing development areas. They have improved since the demo, especially around situations that could block progress or around spawning, but they are not finished. Squads are still fairly basic, more unit types are planned, and mission generation, balance, and usability will keep getting more work during Early Access.

If you mainly want the gunship combat, the current version is already in a good place. If you mainly want very polished squad tactics or deep RTS-style AI behavior, it may be better to follow development for a bit longer.

After having worked on Drone Sector for over 4300 hours, I am proud of the foundation the game has now, and I'm happy to keep going.

Is Early Access right for you?

I want players to have a clear idea of what Drone Sector offers on day one of Early Access. The demo showed the core shooting and battlefield support, while the Early Access version adds the larger structure around it and expands the amount of content.

If that sounds interesting, Wishlisting and Following Drone Sector here on Steam helps a lot.

Ingmar