Welcome to our first project, Sword of Damocles! It's a top-down space-based sandboxy RTS roguelite (whew). We're excited you've found us this early in our development. If you happen to be reading this from the not so near future instead, that's pretty cool as well. 

We're building a very small part of a much larger vision, and we plan to release that small part at the end of this year (2025). This release will contain a tutorial that will later become the tutorial for a more intricate game with features that will not be included in our first release. What we have planned for this first tutorial, while still incomplete, is what we hope to be a fun game with a good opportunity to balance core mechanics that will drive future game development and additional features.

We hope to build something that checks a lot of boxes for people who like games that we like - we want to make something challenging and with a satisfying and rewarding progression and meta-progression. A game that can be enjoyed by the technical rts gamer, the master rogue light strategist, and the lore obsessed alike. Our vision is to reward unique strategies and allow multiple paths to victory, incentivizing creative and out of the box thinking. For this to be possible, we need to develop a complex, multifaceted interaction web of different, balanced gameplay elements, each providing a possible way to glory.

We tried not to overreach with our first game ever made, and aim to produce a small piece of this final game in the form of the tutorial described above. This will allow us to balance a core part of the overall gameplay early on, figure out what is the most enjoyable about it, and emphasize those aspects moving through development. We also want to reward anyone willing to spend their money on this project in its early days with a guarantee of full access to all current and future content. Following this initial beta/early access release, there will be two additional phases the development will go through. The three phase plan described below is a rough outline of our future direction. We've got some ambitious plans in here, so it's entirely possible we aren't able to meet all of these goals. We will do our best to keep development aligned with these steps, and will update the community if these change.

Phase 1: Tutorial. This is our beginnings. You pilot a large ship fighting star bases and drones, enemy vessels and crafts. Our goal is to teach you how to fly around and shoot your weapons, you can also fight a mixture of easy to hard enemies. Get a good grip on fighting and flying because this will be very prevalent in phase 2. A few things from phase 3 will also be implemented here in a scaled-back form, like resource collection, refinement, and management, crafting, mothership management, planet-side encounters, exploration of randomly generated systems, and boss battles.

Phase 2: This is the next step towards our final game design. It's a round robin tournament style winner takes all single elimination fight to the death. Purchase upgrades to your ship and test your mettle against automated ships. Can you win it all? We hope to truly refine and balance the combat system before introducing the crafting and unit management that will follow.

Phase 3: Here's where stuff gets crazy. We have a lot of features planned with a less structured development cycle. Below is a list of our planned game systems, in no particular order: 

    energy management

    resource collection, refinement, and management 

    crafting (casting, machining, assembly, blueprints, legendaries) 

    mothership management (life support, system repair and upgrades) 

    smaller shuttle management

    crew management

    crew skill trees 

    exploration of randomly generated systems 

    inventory (for your ship and crew) 

    boss battles 

    new species (with full playability like the humies after being unlocked) 

    species diplomacy and relations 

    planet-side encounters 

    in-game events

We've put in a fair amount of work in phase 1 already, and our goal of a 2025 release is looking extremely likely. We are now faced with the task of untangling the story of this game's development and presenting it here for you. We'll keep the rest of this post brief, but to end with, here are a couple screen grabs from in game.

the human mothership exterior

back out the camera a bit

a bit more

MORE

MORE!!!

a sneak preview of the hud

Thanks so much for reading this far! We're so excited to have even brought you to this point at our journey, and we can't wait to show you what's in store. From the team at P3pp3rSw4rm studios, we'll see you next time.