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DRAKE - top-down Space Western action RPG with choices and consequences

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
https://drake-game.com/





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Developed by a team called Solarsuit, consisted of people from Russia, Poland and Kazakhstan. Combat seems like bang bang top-down shooter (gameplay is not really shown anyway) but they're boasting about different ways to build your character and play, the Codex favorite: choices and consequences.

DRAKE is a Sci-Fi Action-RPG set on a distant desert planet. Game is currently in development. Join our community to stay in touch with the progress!



Uncover the secrets that are hidden under the planet's crust. Shape the look of humanity in first contact and try to survive in a harsh Space Western World.

STORY WITH CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR DECISIONS
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A series of events leads you to an unknown device deep under the surface of the planet - an artifact of an alien civilization. However not everyone is happy with this discovery: the planetary administration, which siphons resources from the crust, declares you as the enemy number one. Save yourself and uncover the truth about the artifact. Meet different factions, make decisions that will affect the story and the endings.

VARIOUS WAYS TO PLAY
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Use the system of perks and skills to choose the style of playing. It's up to you to decide who you are - a reckless thug who leaves behind rivers of blood, or a charismatic leader who persuades the feeble-minded. Maybe you are a deceiver who looks for personal benefits, or do you prefer to stay away from troubles? Finish the game without a single shot or without saying a word!

SCI-FI ADVENTURE
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Gather a team that will help you along the way, meet the prospectors who came in search of easy money, miners and criminals. Choose the most suitable path - a long but safe or a fast and risky one. Remember - you are enemy number one, the pursuers are close and time is always running out!

WELCOME TO DRAKE - SPACE WESTERN WORLD!
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  • A Sci-Fi Top-Down Action RPG set on a desert planet with a Space Western vibe.
  • Choose the backstory and appearance of the protagonist and guide him through a fateful adventure.
  • Non-linear story with lots of characters and branched dialogues inspired by our beloved CRPGs.
  • Well developed world with different factions and forces where you have to find your own place.
  • Original soundtrack.
  • Sand that’s coarse and rough and gets everywhere!

World map exploration seems to have detailed survival mechanics for an RPG. Being chased slightly reminds me of Fallout 1's original time limit. (Their press kit mentions Fallout 1 and 2, Arcanum as inspirations for CRPG-ness btw.)

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Last edited:
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Nov 22, 2020
Messages
2,163
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming!
"C´mon try to impress me!" says the big strong wahmin of color in armored suit.

"You have really big... everything!"

Developed by a team called Solarsuit, consisted of people from Russia, Poland and Kazakhstan.

Of course, western cucks would not dare to have a line like that in the current year.

Honestly, this seems like something to keep an eye on. Space Western (like Firefly) is not something you get to see that often.
 

Arbaces

Novice
Joined
Sep 11, 2021
Messages
42
An action RPG with choices and consequences and a western feel? This game won't be able to escape comparisons to Weird West. Was Drake in development before Weird West's gameplay was revealed? It would be a bold choice to attempt a clone or cash in on the popularity of a game that isn't even out yet, so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. It's looking to be a good time for fans of real-time action combat.
 

None

Scholar
Joined
Sep 5, 2019
Messages
1,453
Might have potential. Especially if they get a new 2D artist.
 

Lady Error

█▓▒░ ░▒▓█
Patron
Vatnik
Joined
Jan 21, 2021
Messages
9,215
Strap Yourselves In
These people's English is horrible.

*These peoples' English is horrible.

People's English refers to either the common man or a nation. "Peoples' English" is the correct placement of the apostrophe in this case.
 

Humbaba

Arcane
Joined
Aug 12, 2021
Messages
2,939
Location
SADAT HQ
*These peoples' English is horrible.

People's English refers to either the common man or a nation. "Peoples' English" is the correct placement of the apostrophe in this case.

But I was referring to the common man. I wasn't making a blanket statement about Easterlings.
 

Lady Error

█▓▒░ ░▒▓█
Patron
Vatnik
Joined
Jan 21, 2021
Messages
9,215
Strap Yourselves In
You were referring to the game creators: people (in plural)

A people is not what your were referring to.
 

cyborgboy95

News Cyborg
Joined
Aug 24, 2019
Messages
2,735
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1735880/view/5312560606027745978

Cheers! My name is Dmitry. In our free time me and my friends are developing Drake - a Top-Down Sci-Fi Action RPG in a space western setting!

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The New Year is here, holidays gone, and we’ve found out we’ve forgotten to conclude the results of the last year… and even haven’t created any devlog!
We suppose that our real indie-world works like - no post - no work done.

So, the belated RESULTS 2021
To be honest, this word annoys me (results), but self-reflection is a tool to progress!

Long story short: the game is in 3D now, we have defined the core gameplay mechanics, added a lot of assets, begun testing story variations, created a cool teaser and launched a Steam page!

Bye!


Just kidding, please add this game to your wishlist and get back to reading Drake Devlog 2021

Further there might be: a lot of text, devs terminology, pictures, maps, easter eggs, and a few useful links.

Let’s get started!
Formalization of the game mechanics

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In 2021 we have finally defined the main theme of the game and how it should look like. We concentrated on the key ideas from quite a wide list of ones:

  • A Story which can be viewed from different angles. We really want to create an interesting and variative story about the brutal world of the future. It will develop around the player, engaging them in studying the world and proposing different options to solve the problems they face.
  • Gameplay follows the chosen role. We’d like to provide an ability to select the gameplay style based on personal wishes:
    • Use fast and dynamic battle system which depends on player’s reaction to speedrun the game level
    • Look for the alternative, slower paced ways, using hacking and solving technical puzzles
    • Go deep into the story, talking to other characters, convicting, manipulating and bluffing them
  • A Sci-Fi dystopian atmosphere. We've chosen a mix of NASA-punk and Space Western as the basis of visual style, music environment and overall aesthetics.
We have added all those points to the document called Drake Pillars - the basis of building the game. Basically, if you're a small indie or a big not-indie, and making games - I strongly advise you to read about Pillars and Triangles.

Here is the article which inspired me a lot[www.raspberrypi.com]

It will help you to not spray out in different directions and focus on alpha and omega. Our team suffers from this from time to time, basically. So, such document will help us to cut the unnecessary things and cultivate the key ideas.

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The way we defined our “Pillars” most likely can’t be considered as ideal, but it helped us concentrate on really important parts of the game. If you are creating your own game - don’t be lazy and define your own Pillars. Those Pillars will help you further at different stages (it doesn’t even matter how finely they’re formulated). All in all, it’s just a text which can be edited and improved with better phrases anytime. The key is to keep the heart of the game in it.

Moving from 2D to 3D

What’s cool about being indie? You can just totally redirect the project (at least at earlier stages) and nobody gets hurt!

Probably, the most important and biggest thing we’ve achieved during the last year - is having remastered everything we did for the last 3 years. We have turned the 2D-sprite top-down shooter into a 3rd dimension one.

Just to have strict vision - a gif “before” and “after”

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3D graphics solve many problems with visuals, customization and animations, but require more work with assets. We don’t have any financing, so we solve difficulties with models in different ways. For example, we thought that it would be simple enough to create 3D-models of cavern’s walls using only our own skills (oh, we were so wrong...)

After a few iterations we chose a variant, where we have about 20 different form-pieces. Those pieces were created with a custom-made form-generator and then manually retopped for the game engine. They have one shader, which we can expand further.

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We decided to purchase various generic assets like station walls, tables, chairs, boxes, barrels, pipes, etc. from the Unity Asset Store at this stage. Most indies create their whole games using those asset-packs. Such projects may lose their own identity, but can be published really fast!

Anyway, purchasing quite a big asset-pack - be ready that your project will highly expand in its volume.

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Another decision was to manually create all the characters, fauna, and other unique elements, for example the rover. All those items are the face of the project and it’s worth investing most resources into this part. I’ll write about this in detail below.

Characters and planet’s fauna

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In 2021 our artists team was boosted with the 3D design specialists. After moving to a fully 3D look of the game we also started going deeper into the visual development of the characters, costumes and fauna.

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The pipeline for character creation roughly looks like this:

Concept -> 2d Art for dialogues -> Sculpting (Zbrush) -> Retopology (3ds max, blender) -> Painting (Substance) -> Auto Rigging and Basic animations (Mixamo) -> Import to project (Unity)

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Automatic Rigging and animations in Mixamo - are quite a weak part which limits us a lot. Skinning contains artifacts and requires some clean-up after the algorithmic approach. That’s required just to avoid stretching of the character parts which are not meant to be stretched. Also animations can work not as expected - probably because of multiple conversions of skeleton and avatars in Unity - and finally we are faced with different artifacts in bone orientation. So, if you plan to use Mixamo for your characters - keep in mind that you won’t get great quality. Except for that quality issues, at the starting stage this method can be quite helpful. It’s a way to liven your character up and check it in a project with less time and actions for further prototyping.

Unfortunately, Mixamo doesn’t work for the bugs (local planet’s fauna), and we have to rig and animate those little guys manually. Crisper - the easiest bug that is already done - its rig and animations were made with Blender. Here, basically, we've invested a lot of resources, but with manual editing that one looks awesome!

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Global map, prototyping and chase mechanic.

We have added a global map prototype in the end of 2020. It was required to test the story. We placed a bunch of little text quests at each point on the map as a representation of the story which would happen in that place. This type of testing allowed us to check in game choices, the key flow of the narrative and the degree of broken logic in the storyline if the player skipped some quests for example.

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In 2021 we reworked the visuals and playability of this map. Like other game levels, it received another dimension. Currently we’re using TerrainComposer2 - Unity addon, which helps us to create a planet surface on the map in a non-destructive way, meaning we’re still able to move or change something. For example, move a mountain to a man or redirect rivers backward, avoiding redrawing of the whole surface. This add-on is very interesting, but we miss some abilities for procedural approach, functions of erosion (which appeared in standard terrain editor of Unity’s fresh version) and other cool things. Also we're thinking about choosing Houdini to generate a map surface in 2022.

Picture below - just a part of map’s layers in TerrainComposer2, which endlessly are mixing up to a single surface. Those Nodes are just OP!

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Also the global map obtained the seeds of the interface. We’ve created a prototype of various UI windows, tested some element placements and data locations, that should help the player on the global map. It became a good starting point for artists and game-designers. Now we want all the mechanics mentioned in the UI to start working (2022 goal?)

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Finally, we have finished a big sprint (aka marathon) to create a chasing mechanic, which follows the player, forcing the character to move forward. Also added volumetric clouds to the map, which immediately stole all the GPU resources. (looks like we're creating next-next-gen game)

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Arseniy, our lead developer, is very happy about having created the chasing system! Just look into his eyes filled with enthusiastic zeal to solve new challenges!

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Teaser!

Together with the publishing of the Steam page we wanted to create a short video about our vision of the game in future. We combined "gameplay" parts from existing in-game assets, using the game engine. Introduction and the planet at the end of the video were made in Blender.

At this stage the teaser, most likely, demonstrates our feelings about the game, it’s atmosphere, and emotions. Basically, all game mechanics, locations and events still require a lot of work.



We hope that in 2022 we’ll create a full-fledged gameplay trailer. Actually we’d prefer to publish more videos about the game (but where is our additional 24 hours per day…)

Music

The sound in the teaser and in the game gives a huge boost to the atmosphere. I’d really like to write more about this part of production, but you need to listen! In 2021, the game obtained 3 unique tracks for different situations, and we started integration with FMOD for deeper development of the sound space and music variativity.

We've made a short video about the recording process for the teaser. Kudos to Misha!


We’ll be very grateful for checking out this video and liking it ;) It’s always inspiring!

Steam Page

We have registered a Steam page in the middle of September! In our opinion, it’s a giant step for all humankind those, who do this for the first time.

http://steam.drake-game.com

Don't forget to add the game to your wishlist, ask your friends, girlfriend, parents, grandma to do the same. It will help us a lot to understand if our way is right and will drastically support us.

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That’s a decisive moment for small indie developers. Steam marketplace algorithm requires to see that your game is interesting to players before release date, and it’s very hard to perform this without big investments, marketing company or publisher, even if the game is incredibly brilliant. Most of the super-successful indie projects are well-built from the marketing side or just being a survival bias. It’s very important to remember this and not to leave this sales topic to the latest moment, sentencing yourself “when I’ll finish development - everyone will see it’s beautiness”

I strongly recommend subscribing to Chris Zukowski’s blog - he posts a lot of useful articles regarding marketing: http://howtomarketagame.com

And also, a friend of mine - Max, who exceedingly helps me with advice and useful connections, mails fresh news about the gaming industry every day: http://ingamedev.com

2022 - A way to heaven the Demo

We plan to focus on game mechanics and prepare a vertical slice - demo version later this year. There are a lot of interesting activities, festivals and events we plan to participate in further, so hang on!

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