For one thing the strategy genre has "evolved and changed" over 20 years, so just a HD Syndicate Wars wouldn't cut it. Right now they're "very early in pre-production" on the cyberpunk IP.
To help shore up the backer pledges the development team have been recording little design chats between themselves. Their latest video discusses Agent death and classes.
"Satellite Reign won't be a simple "remake". It will be its own take on the genre that was defined by the Syndicate series. There really has been nothing like them in the 20 years since, the strategy genre has evolved and changed," 5 Lives Studios' Chris Conte told PC Games Hardware.
"We are very early in pre-production at the moment. After our initial discussions about what the game would be, we focused most of our energy on getting everything ready for Kickstarter. We really wanted people to see the world we had in our minds." With 18 days left to go the indie studio is comfortably past the half way mark.
In their 'Satellite Reign Dev Chat #2' video they reveal:
Agent Death
◾Agents can and will die!
◾If your agents body dies their consciousness is removed and implanted into a new body.
◾Agents will keep their skills and abilities which are carried across with their consciousness.
◾New agents are cloned from a selection of bodies back at base.
◾New bodies can be obtained by multiple means, like: purchasing them from the black market or harvesting them from the population.
◾Cloned bodies have genetic traits that give small bonuses to your agents.
◾Agents lost in the field will lose their augmentations and equipment but if you are fast enough you can salvage the corpse for spare parts or we have multiple insurance packages available to suit your needs.
Classes
◾Your squad is comprised of 4 different agents, each with their own class or speciality: Soldier, Support, Assassin or Hacker.
◾This is only the agents starting point.
◾ You are free to customise each of your agents to be fully combat oriented, fully espionage oriented, or anything in-between.
◾Agents will be able to be customised by giving them different augmentations, skills / abilities, weapons and gear.
◾Each of these customisation options will allow them to play more of a combat role or an espionage role, or anything in-between.
Satellite Reign is a real-time, class-based strategy game set in a dynamic cyberpunk world that reacts to our actions. Do we incite the people to fight the corporations, or just use them as meat shields? See the Kickstarter for more.
Check out the latest Dev Chat below.