Read Recap 1 here!

So, once we've decided to base a game around resource management/some shooting around this amazingly drawn structure, we needed to figure out how to go about the management aspect.

Some of the ideas thrown about were: 1. Shoot drones to collect resources. Manually hook and swing around to asteroids/your ship part to repair/retrieve/detonate drones. This was quickly discarded as I did not want to deal with trying to code 360 space gravity and all the shenanigans that'd entail. 2. Shoot asteroids with resourcing drones to collect resources. Shoot asteroids with destruction drones to destroy them. Shoot broken ship parts with repairing drones to fix them. This would have a singular and more intuitive control scheme (Switch drones & Shoot drones) but it was more work on the UI, and we lost a big chunk of the resource management of drone retrieval with such fire-and-forget mechanics. This would emphasize the arcade aspects of the game more, and we wanted to avoid that. 3. An even more simplified version of the above with LMB to shoot resourcing/repair drones (no need for drone switching mechanics) and RMB to shoot destruction drones. This would remove the UI complications, make it much easier to get into for players - but it had the same problem as before - we didn't want the game to be essentially a shooter with some resourcing thrown into it as an afterthought. 4. There is one kind of drone for everything. If shot at an asteroid, it would collect resources. If shot at a broken part, it would repair. A drone can additionally be blown up or retrieved with a hook (RMB). That second part added a big resourcing consideration and tied together nicely with our drone generator mechanic. Now players would actively have to try to save their drones whenever possible, instead of just firing and forgetting. The ideal gameplay would revolve round saving drones in backup from the drone generators, and having your inventory full at all times. We went with this in the end: 5. We tried a variation of the above where the drone auto-destructed an asteroid if it's near the ship, but removed that because that took away from the management aspect as well.

In the end, we decided to go with the slightly more complex version of resource management over having it feel more arcadey. We feel the controls worked smoothly, just took a little getting-used-to since most people are familiarized by fire-and-forget mechanics by default.

You can play Satelloop here!