Devlog #1: Building Drones War
Welcome to the first Drones War devlog. Drones War is a free, single-player, turn-based hex strategy game that runs in your browser — you command drones and infantry against an AI on a procedurally generated battlefield, with one goal: take the enemy HQ. It's an indie project built in the open, and these posts follow the work as it ships.
Real-world maps are live
You can now take command on battlefields built from real geography. Four historical theatres are baked straight from open elevation and map data — Utah Beach (Normandy), Arnhem, Monte Cassino, and the Ardennes — and each one opens with a short briefing on the real operation. Coastlines and rivers come from the actual terrain, so the Lower Rhine at Arnhem and the Channel off Utah Beach sit right where they should — and supply now carries across a river to the far bank, so a map split by water is yours to bridge. These are historical settings shown for context — a strategy sandbox, not a statement on any conflict.
Here's what else has gone into the game recently.
Infantry that actually thinks
The biggest leap: ground combat is now real infantry squads instead of an abstract "pressure" meter. Squads advance, fight, and hold territory as discrete units — and they finally navigate properly. Under the hood that's real cost-aware pathfinding, so a squad routes around a lake or a ridge instead of stalling against it.
Water got its own rule: a squad can wade across a single river tile, but it's slow (two turns in the open, exposed) — and anything two tiles wide is a hard barrier. Suddenly terrain matters: rivers are lines you defend, fords are chokepoints you contest.
Your infantry digs in
Squads can now build fire points — fortified emplacements that anchor captured ground and shoot back at nearby enemies. The twist: a fire point costs half a squad's strength to raise. So a fresh squad can throw up two fire points across its life and then disband into the line it built. Holding ground is now a real decision, not a free action.
Command each squad the way you want
Every squad carries its own posture — Advance to push the front, Hold to dig in — and you set a global default that new squads inherit, then override per unit. Send a spearhead forward while a second squad holds the river behind it.
The look: a command sand-table
Drones War is styled like a military command sand-table — top-down relief-terrain hexes, holographic cyan flight paths and range rings, a restrained gold instrument HUD. The whole art set (terrain, drones, infantry, FX, the landing page) is generated in that one locked style, so the board reads instantly: blue is yours, red is theirs, cyan is in motion.
How it's made
No game engine, no install — it's a hand-built web stack (TypeScript, PixiJS, React) that runs in any modern browser. The simulation is fully deterministic from a seed, which means a given match always plays out the same way — great for fair AI, reproducible bugs, and saved games that resume exactly where you left them.
What's next
The near-term roadmap:
- A deeper tech tree and a frontier-style campaign where the stakes grow as you push out.
- More real-world theatres — now that the map pipeline is live, new battlefields are just a bounding box away.
- Ongoing balance and polish from playtesting against the bot.
If that sounds like your kind of game, the best thing you can do is play it and tell us what breaks.