Drox Operative 2 Interview

Steven Peeler, the founder of Soldak Entertainment, recently had a chat with Space Game Junkie, talking about his upcoming starship action RPG Drox Operative 2 that should be launching into Steam Early Access soon. Here are a couple of sample questions and you take things from there:

You seemed to hem and haw on an actual sequel to Drox for a while? What finally convinced you to move forward with an actual sequel?

I was always hoping I could return to the Drox world, the first one was quite fun to work on. The hemming and hawing was really just because I don’t tend to make decisions on future games. I try to focus on the current game as much as possible.

What would you say you were least satisfied with in regards to the first game that you hope to correct in the sequel?

I would say it was the movement in general. It ended up being slower, and not as important as other systems, as I would have liked. In the sequel, it has been sped up quite a bit, you can dodge more incoming attacks than before, and you can actually collide with enemy ships. Basically, used well movement can help you greatly and used poorly it will get you into more trouble.

On the opposite tack, what do you think worked best in the original that you hope to improve or expand upon in the sequel?

I think the atmosphere of existing in this universe that responds to your actions but also evolves based on what all of the races are doing worked really well and is still pretty unique. This is still very true in the sequel, but we are giving the players even more tools to impact the universe around them.

Additionally, this blog post lets us know that the early access launch will be coming later than initially planned:

It looks like Drox 2’s Early Access is going to get postponed a little bit. We are still in the Steam build review approval process. I submitted it last Thursday and Steam rejected it last night. I had left the Steam cloud stuff set as developer only and they wanted screenshots with the UI visible. I fixed both of those issues and resubmitted this morning. Since it is completely out of my hands I don’t know how long the delay will be. It could be day or a week, I’m not really sure. Also on the Steamworks page it warns that their people are working from home because of Covid-19 and that could delay things more than usual.

As an aside, I actually never meant to have an exact date visible in the first place. I thought it was going to just say coming soon. When the store page went live with the actual estimated date, I was annoyed at Steam. However when I reread the options in Steamworks for the coming soon part, the store page was doing exactly what I selected. I either read it wrong this time or it has changed since we released our last game, either way it was my fault. 🙁

Anyway, as soon as we have the go ahead and it’s not a terrible time to release, we will start Early Access. I’m hoping it will at least be within a week. In the meantime, I’m doing builds every couple days, so the game is getting better and better. I can’t wait to get all of your feedback!