DronAR was a mini-project that resulted from my research into the implementation of swarm mechanics in Unity. It’s a mobile game similar to “Drone Swarm” by Stillalive Studios. The game was intended to be a minigame, featuring only a PvE wave defense mode.
The core objective of the game was to defend your ship from various threads using the touch-controllable drone swarm(s). Between waves you are able to upgrade various systems of your ship and your drones. There was no real end to the game, so your goal was to stay alive as long as possible.
I learned alot about developing for mobile with this project…obviously, but what really buffed my knowledge in Unity was my dive into Burst Jobs and Compute Shaders. All those drones on a mobile device? You better milk your code as much as you can. Those have proven to be a great tool to achieve the scale of thing that I imagined in my early days.
The development of DronAR nearly saw it being finished and uploaded to the App Store. The only thing is: I can’t consider it more than a very simple wave defense with one cool mechanic. Drone Swarm for example is just…better. Since applying to the App store costs money, the whole process is tedeous and I would need to spend percious time with app store support, I have since decided to just consider DronAR a successfull Proof of Concept.
