Thanks for playing the demo and giving us feedback!
[p][/p][p]Releasing the demo was quite a milestone for us as a team, and for me personally. [/p][p][/p][p]I started learning game dev in 2020. I've gone a LONG time without a public demo for anyone to play. Imagine the pressure of having 100,000 wishlists and releasing the first playable build! [/p][p][/p][p]To my relief, people really really liked it. We have a lot of feedback on what to change, improve, and all that, but I think the core takeaway for me was: We are on the right track. That is SUCH a good feeling. [/p][p] [/p][p][img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/41689504/5e34c3b0516a3a8f02c0d364101035c6bda088fd.gif"][/p][p][/p]
[p]Thank you for completing the survey as well- this data is super helpful for us. We are working on prioritizing game changes + future features based on your requests. [/p][p][/p]
Larger, Open-Ended Missions
[p]We got a lot of feedback from people that- while they liked the demo- they missed having larger missions that were less scripted. We are adding a mission to the demo that will serve as our experiment with large missions. Once this is released, we want your feedback on how it feels. [/p][p][/p][p]The goal here is to explore some slightly large game loops that require the player to plan a bit: do I want to take on this next base, or do I want to go find health or missile ammo first? Is that missile crate guarded by enemies worth the risk? [/p][p][/p]
In-Game Full Screen Map
[p]We have added a first implementation of this, and will include it in the next build. This is part of our goal of introducing larger missions. [/p][p][/p][p][img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/41689504/32d1c922d3cb6184b6158f2e759eb589633e6891.png"][/p]
Dodge
[p]We are planning to make the dodge more useful, but with a more limited use. More info on this later. [/p][p][/p]
Better Ground Indicator
[p]A lot of people mentioned not being sure where the helicopter was, especially when being shot by the enemy jet. We are going to work on making the ground indicator show on the water, and look into some other ways to make this better. [/p][p][/p]
Vehicle Relative Movement
[p]This was the control scheme in the Strike series- so It makes sense. We are tracking this and going to do some playtesting with adding this as an option.[/p][p][/p]
Localization
[p]We have started the technical work to localize all the text in the game and will have it translated to a first set of languages soon.[/p][p][/p]
Additional Options
[p]We're tracking a number of things here, a lot of these options are planned and won't be very difficult to add. [/p]
[p]Option for minimal UI[/p]
[p]Disable screen shake[/p]
[p]Blood toggle[/p]
[p]Adjusting UI position on ultrawide monitors[/p]
[p]Some fixes for the profanity filter options[/p]
[p]Better button binding- we will expose the movement buttons and fix some issues[/p]
[p][/p]
Features/Changes After Demo
[p][/p][p]The above list is just what we're focusing on in the near term. We are categorizing the rest of your feedback and tracking it for the full game. So if you didn't see your request above, don't worry. [/p][p][/p]
Join The Discord!
[p]Along with the demo, we finally opened up our public discord. We will post changelogs and more details there: Discord Invite Link[/p][p][/p][p]Huge thanks to everyone for playing. We hope to deliver more to you soon![/p][p][/p][p]- Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team [/p]
Next Fest Has Started!
[p][/p][p][img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/41689504/a3d50aa96682dc4c5d42cb591e285d4e7e986e62.png"][/p][p][/p][p]Play The Demo![/p][p][/p]
We Are Live On Next Fest!
[p][/p][p]Hello wishlisters and future current pilots! I hope you're enjoying the demo- we've been loving all your feedback in the demo survey and all your comments that you've posted on social media. [/p][p]If you haven't played the demo yet, go give it a try and send us your feedback! [/p]
[p]If you're not aware, Steam Next Fest is a festival where Steam features upcoming games and players get a chance to play a bunch of demos. We were able to release the demo right before Next Fest. So go check it out: Steam Next Fest[/p][p][/p][p][img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/41689504/4f5dee4d5c090c03af72550a477849d268d675c3.gif"][/p][p][/p]
Thank You!
[p]The demo has already been played 7.745 times! We are blown away. It was a bit scary releasing our first public playable build but the reception has been amazing. [/p][p][/p][p]Thanks again, keep giving us your feedback, it helps! [/p][p][/p][p]- Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team [/p]
[p][/p][p]Thanks for all your support- I know some of you have been here for years- and it means a lot. This has been a long time coming for me too. I'm super excited for you to play and give us feedback! [/p][p][/p][p]- Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team [/p]
Demo Drops... TOMORROW !!!
Hello to our extremely patient and good looking wishlisters,
Today I FINALLY get to announce that our public demo will drop tomorrow (Friday), and Cleared Hot will be in the Steam Next Fest the following week!]
About a month ago, I wasn't sure we would hit this. It was going to be risky, but I felt it was the right time to release something playable. We talked as a team and decided to go all in and do our best to hit it.
Our spirit producer kept chanting his mantra...
About 3 weeks ago things were questionable. We put in a massive week and I was starting to feel that familiar smell of burn out. Things were going well but we had a lot to do and our trello board only seemed to grow larger with each day.
We thought about delaying it but we didn't want to make you wait any longer
So we kept at it. About 2 weeks ago it started to feel possible. I started feel emotionally ready to joke about releasing our demo right before next fest, which is... not the common advice :D
We let in some more playtesters from the email list and started to get some real feedback.
But we persevered and we finally pushed our last commit of what would become our golden-master demo build, marked with an equally epic commit log of "No comment has been set". That's just Ruben being humble.
We pushed it live and after a very late night and very early morning, we sent the build out to streamers and content creators, and crossed our fingers.
To our relief, it went really well.
Both LevelCap and Raptor released videos super quickly, and we have more on the way. Check them out below. Special thanks to LevelCap for giving us feedback over the last year or so!
We even got a visit in the comments from Tony Barnes, the co-designer of the Strike series, who I've been in touch with since our Steam page launched. I still marvel that they programmed those games in assembly language.
This is such a huge milestone for us, seriously, I am so happy to announce this. So much work had to come together to hit this, about a month ago I wasn't sure we could do it. It is a bit early for us to join the Next Fest, but I felt it was time for us to release something that you could play.
The demo will feature 4 missions, a bit of the early story. I think y'all will like it.
We can't wait for you to play and share your nostalgia + feedback with us!
The demo will go live on Steam sometime Friday morning, around 10am PDT. Maybe earlier if that big green release button looks irresistible.
Please play the demo, wishlist it if you haven't already, and give us your feedback!
Seriously, thanks so much for all the support. This is a major milestone and marks a new phase where your feedback will shape the game even more.
Thanks for sticking with us! Enjoy the demo!!
-A very tired Colin "cfinger" and the very tired Cleared Hot team
Not Knowing Corporation
Hello Wishlisters- Today I bring you some behind the scenes news.
We are renaming our studio from Cfinger Games to Not Knowing Corporation. Check out our new site: notknowing.com (Don't worry, game updates are coming too).
Cfinger was (is?) my gaming nickname. It was granted to me by my high school friends in the days of CS 1.6. I named the company Cfinger Games because it felt personal, and weird. I figured if I released a game as a solo dev, people would know it came from me.
Well, it turns out I'm not solo anymore. I'm part of an awesome team and I want this company to take on it's own identity outside of me.
Wtf is Not Knowing?
"Not Knowing" is what happens when you see something with fresh eyes. To actually be creative, you have to assume you don't already know the answer, and be curious.
Not knowing can also be a meditation prompt, like: "try not knowing your breath", as a way to experience breathing as if you don't already know what it is. Wow, never thought I'd be talking about meditation on Steam but here we are.
Besides making games, I want this company to encourage creativity and to help others. Part of our publishing agreement with MicroProse is that we both donate 1% of the game profits to charity, for a total of 2%. (Pretty cool that MicroProse was onboard with this!)
If you'd like to hear more from me about this, check out the video below. It is really annoying to have to see your own face on a youtube video.
Okay, back to the game !
We Are In Production
In April we entered the production phase of Cleared Hot. For us this means that we are now working on the actual campaign content that will be in the game. Most of the work was deciding on gameplay systems and implementing them on missions that did not include any story or progression.
In this phase of development we're being careful not to increase the scope at all, and to find ways to make things go faster.
Our spirit-producer has changed his mantra.
Building missions while we already have all the tools we've built is a much better experience for us. We can focus directly on the player's experience instead of having to implement everything as we go.
Now we have a pretty solid grasp of the story, characters, and how the missions will progress through the first 2 biomes.
New Maps
Our 3d artist, Mane, has been hard at work expanding the maps for the campaign. Here are some work in progress screenshots.
Vehicle Pathfinding
At some point I will do an entire write up on this, but today I'll just share a bit. We added a lot of vehicle pathfinding functionality, both to follow roads, to avoid local obstacles, and to follow pathfinding waypoints.
Vehicles have various steering behaviors: try to follow the road, avoid obstacles, reverse if you hit something, etc. They get summed up together and the resulting direction is where the vehicle tries to go.
Fun fact, I first wrote steering behavior code for the chickens.
Play Tests
We will do a large playtest event, with a selection of people from our email listwithin the next month.
This will include opening up our Discord and taking as much feedback as you can give us. I don't want to spoil anything so I will leave it at that.
Thank You!
Thanks for supporting us, it means a lot. We are entering a super exciting phase of the game, and I can't wait to share more soon.
-Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team
Gunship Dispatch #1: Mistakes
Hello brave wishlisters, welcome back to our humble devlog, where I put my heart and soul into 5MB gifs and curse at Steam for not allowing video. BUT. Today we have a video: Check out episode 1 of a series we're calling Gunship Dispatches.
This is a series we are doing to explore the background story of the main character. No spoilers, I'll let you watch!
Destruction!
This is a very satisfying update for me, because since our first gifs I have been responding to comments about things being destructible. I knew we would handle it eventually, but it never felt like the right time. BUT NOW IT IS.
We were wondering what happens if the tower gets destroyed, do the NPCs fall and die? Turns out, yes.
Welcome to what our schedule has termed "DESTRUCTION WEEK". Probably more like two weeks. Where we all focus on how we want destruction to work in the game.
We realized, a better way to approach this is: How the world reacts to you. As a player you just want to feel like your actions are causing real repercussions in the game world, and the game world is responding to your actions.
Accidentally destroying your neighbor's fence...
We still have some things to improve. The structures are creating too many pieces, more than is needed to look good. But we have our general strategy for how we will do this in the game, and can start creating destroyable content for the missions. Super exciting.
NPC Reactions
Another way the world responds to you is through the NPCs. We added a few NPC reactions + states to the world around them to make them less static.
Investigation: If an NPC hears a shot nearby, sees someone shooting, or hears an NPC say "enemy spotted", he will go investigate what's up
Panic: If an NPC dies from a collision nearby, or if he sees an NPC get picked up by the rope, he will panic and run away
Follow: If an NPC sees the helo but is outside of their shooting range, they will run into range and shoot
Wandering: An NPC will ocassionally walk around and look at things :)
I think overall it helps a ton, we no longer have situations where NPCs are standing idly by while their friends get mowed down.
Persistent Changes
After you have a giant battle in an area, you kinda want it to look different. We did this by adding decals for bullet impacts, explosions, and blood splatters.
Playtests Coming
We will be accepting some new playtesters soon. If you aren't on the email list already, join here: https://clearedhotgame.com/email-list/
Thank You
Thank you all for your support! We are super busy and have a ton of new things coming up to show you.
Enemy Experiments
Hello Pilots,
I better start writing this update because we have enough content for 3 devlogs and there are some really cool things I want to share.
The general theme of the last couple weeks was "enemy depth". I want to make sure we've explored every archetype of enemy before we get too far on our campaign.
So we theorized about which units to make, and then we whipped up some prototypes along with some new missions to test the units in. What you see below is a result of that. These all will likely change before they show up in the actual campaign, but I feel our experiments were successful.
Barracks Building
Enemy Spawner
The barracks is our first "functional" building that spawns enemies, and can be destroyed. Well, it can spawn any kind of unit, so in the future we're thinking we might have different kinds: A hangar that spawns aircraft, or a tank hangar... etc.
Shielded Turret
Make the player go around
This turret takes no damage from the front, but is easy to kill from behind. We're using this as a level design tool to incentivize players to find the best way to enter a base. We may re-use this concept to have vehicles or enemies that have weak points or directional damage.
Underground Turret
Make the player get close
If you played enough desert strike, you learned to sit at the edge of the screen and lob rounds at enemies just outside their range. While I think this can be a viable strategy, we wanted to explore what it's like if you can't do that.
This turret is not damageable until it pops up. And it fires a couple missiles very quickly. Making you dodge the missiles if you want to destroy it.
Artillery / Mortar Enemy
The "oh sh*t" moment
We really like the jet enemy that telegraphs it's strafing run with a red warning area on the ground. We wanted to explore if we could do this with a ground enemy, in a different pattern.
You can also use this enemy to take out other enemies... Not sure how we will use this in the level design yet but I didn't want to prevent it from happening.
Machine Gun Telegraph Attack
"When The Wave Breaks Here, Don't Be There"
A lot of the machine gun units have a similar "meta" to defeat them: just fly fast around them. We wanted to make a unit that breaks that. This enemy aims ahead of you, shows a laser, and then fires a super powerful gun. It requires you to change direction at the right time.
It still needs a bit of tweaking, but I like the concept of being able to dodge machine gun fire like this. Dodging feels great in the game, so it is cool to see that we can expand that beyond missiles.
What Do You Think?
Remember that these are prototypes: They will go through some iteration and we will find a way to make them fit in the game world without feeling out of place.
This might also be a good time to talk about "realism". I see Cleared Hot being a game that reflects things from the real world, but bends them in a way that suits the gameplay.
In other words, all of our helos, weapons, enemies, are grounded in reality. They are doing things that are possible in the real world, but we will re-interpret them in the Cleared Hot world in order to give you a more fun experience. Whenever possible we will base units off their real world counter-part (real helos, weapons, missiles, etc), but in some cases we will borrow from real things and create something new.
I think this is a fine line. I usually rely on my gut feeling for this stuff. This game is inspired by all the games that I've played over the last 30 years, and my preference is to have things be "based in reality" but then modify that for gameplay.
Thank You
The team is kicking ass right now and every week we seem to be tackling something major. It's really motivating. I feel like our momentum is increasing.
The community of fans is equally incredible. Sometimes it's hard to believe. Thank you for all of your interest, your comments, emails, upvotes, etc. It's really appreciated and stokes the fire.
We still have a lot of work ahead of us but I think we're narrowing in on a really really fun experience to deliver for you all.
Thank you! More coming soon!
-Colin and the Cleared Hot team
Jungle Mayhem
Hello Faithful Wishlisters,
I trust you've all recovered from your holidays and are back into the swing of things. So allow me to distract you for a bit with some Jungle flavored nostalgia.
We wanted to explore what a wave defense mission would look like, inspired by none other than our game designer, Enzo. So he jumped in with both feet and made this mission "Jungle Mayhem", named so you know this one is going to be a cluster f*$@.
Defend the Satellite Dishes
In this mission, you are tasked with defending some communications equipment from waves of enemies.
You have a bit of time at first to pick up some automated turrets and move them into place around your base.
You can position them on one of the 3 roads where enemies attack from, or you can place them closer to the satellite dishes. It's up to you.
There are also some scattered enemy encampments that have extra ammo and health crates to steal.
Chaos
Once the waves start, it's pretty chaotic. The waves overlap each other, so you have to cover all sides at once.
This mission also really utliizes our increased NPC performance, and I have to say, it's quite fun launching missiles into groups of 30+ NPCs.
Experiment: Comeback Mechanic
We are experimenting with a "comeback" mechanic, that is almost similar to having multiple lives. When you lose all your health, you lose one "life" or "shield", and you have a couple seconds of invulnerability to try and escape.
This has the effect of allowing you to make a few mistakes in a mission without having to restart. I find it's a more clear message to the player of "you just fucked up, and you have to get the hell out of there immediately".
It does serve to make the game easier in a way, but I think we will scale this with our difficulty settings in the game.
Playtests
I said we were going to pick 10 people to start our playtesting with... well, 250 of you responded. That made my job suuuper hard. At some point I had to just go with whoever signed up first. We ended up with 28 playtesters. If you aren't part of this playtest, don't worry! We will open this up more soon.
We finally kicked off this playtesting on Tuesday. Although it is a small group of people, it is a huge milestone for us. I've always opted to develop "in the open" by sharing our progress early on, but having real players play the game is paramount.
As everyone on the team started to get nervous about adding new features, this gif became the team mantra. "Should I try to include ___ before we open up the playtest" let's see what the head of QA says:
Somehow he always knows what's best
So far, things have gone really well. We didn't have any major issues, people have been recording their playthroughs and sending us feedback.
If I'm being honest, it was scary! The first time real players got to play the game. But now we have a higher confidence that we are on the right track. And we will have an audience to check us going forward. We still have a lot of work to do, but things feel a bit more "real" with people playing the game.
We have to test things now. Or so says our QA team.
If you'd like to be considered for future playtests, make sure you're subscribed to the email list, and fill out the survey that we sent out. Email list signup: https://clearedhotgame.com/email-list
Thank you for your continued support!
-Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team
Running Over NPCs
Hello Faithful Wishlisters,
The snappiness and overall feel of Cleared Hot is one of my top priorities. The game was starting to drop fps in larger missions and it was time for a clean-up. Physics Ragdolls were the first order of business.
Ragdolls
Our NPCs use something called Active Ragdolls, to allow physics to interact with NPCs that are following animations. But calculating the physics for this takes a lot of CPU time. So our first effort was to reduce this to only the times that ragdolls, or active ragdolls, were needed.
It was important that we maintain the physics fun-ness of being able to run over NPCs. So we started there.
If you watch the gif closely, you can see the frame where the ragdoll gets enabled, right before being run over. This allows us to save the CPU time of ragdolls and only use it when we really need it: when they get run over.
Let's see it at full speed now...
Fixing Collisions with Many NPCs
Once we start adding a lot of NPCs, there used to be some stutters when colliding with many of them at once. It would cause some strange behaviors and overall just made it not feel very smooth.
So we started experimenting with simplifying collisions with NPCs and vehicles and other physics objects, and restricting the collisions to their main torso collider. This simplifies a lot, increases performance, and makes the collisions look better.
Doing this allowed us to increase the number of NPCs getting run over to 50.
Changing this required a large number of test cases. Ariel from the team took this on and built quite an impressive list of test scenarios.
After making all these changes, we compared the NPC performance using a test we made earlier of 50 npcs all shooting each other.
With our changes, the avg FPS on my machine went from 144 to 275, a 91% improvement. Of course this is only in the worst case scenario, but we should see a really nice bump across our missions with this in place.
I am super excited this all came together and I had a ton of fun working on it with the team.
The playtest will be small, with 2-3 missions, and we will start with only 10 playtesters. But this will grow over time.
As always, thanks for your support!
-Colin and the Cleared Hot team
Viral Reddit Post Aftermath + Combat Refinements
Welcome back faithful wishlisters, and hello to all the new people who discovered us last month!
The Publisher announcement went better than I ever could've expected, with our Reddit post reaching the front page of all of Reddit! We were #6 on r/all for awhile, which is insane. Thank you all who commented or shared it with friends. And for your wishlists!
27,000 of you wishlisted the game in one week! We just crossed 90,000 total wishlists. Thank you!
This kind of interest helps us SO MUCH. It helps us understand what parts of the game you're interested in, and really gets us all really excited for the future. The amount of people asking for a console release was noted both by us and MicroProse.
New 3D Assets
We have been hard at work, freshly envigorated by all of your interest. Our artist Mane has been building out our Jungle level with more assets, as we prepare to build a new mission on it.
We also are exploring starting some missions from off-shore, and have a work in progress ship model.
Performance Improvements
We improved the performance of our jungle assets to avoid unnecessary overdraw, which is what happens when the game has to render a pixel multiple times. Trying to find the right style of tree that fits within our "stylized low poly" theme took a bit of work. So this is part of the process of narrowing it down to what works for looks and for performance.
Unity has an overdraw visualizer tool that allows you to see the problematic areas. Some overdraw is inevitable but minimizing it will lower the work done to render each frame. The overdraw areas are shown in red / purple above.
NPC Performance
We are also working to improve the performance of our NPCs, by reducing the amount of physics calculations needed and making some decisions about when they can be animated vs being full ragdolls.
One of the simpler improvements is simply using less physics components to model the ragdolls. From our camera distance, the NPCs are quite small and we don't need really detailed modeling of each limb. We were able to reduce the number of physics components per NPC from 13 to 6. It's not noticeable in the game and gave me a 25% increase in FPS when showing a 25v25 NPC battle.
Unity 6 Update
Our main code branch is officially on Unity 6, as of today! This will bring some new features into the engine and promises some performance improvements.
For those who aren't aware, Unity is the game engine we are building the game on. So when Unity gets updates, it should make the game faster, as well as improve our dev process. This was a pretty big update for Unity, so we are hopeful. No data on this yet, but we will comment in the next update about it.
Combat Refinements
We've also been focusing on refining the core combat in the game. We are starting to have enough enemies + content in the game that we need to pay attention to the combat details.
As part of this, we hired a game designer: Welcome, Enzo! Right now Enzo is helping us explore how to segment the enemies. Each one should have a distinct strength and weakness, and can be combined in interesting ways. We started by focusing on the turrets, and have been exploring some different turret + missile types.
The general idea is to have turrets that fit some archetypes, like "the really powerful one that takes a long time to reload" or "the one that shoots lots of missiles but is slow".
We use code names for these, just to differentiate them for gameplay. We will model these to fit into realistic names / 3d models later, but for now we want to focus on what is most fun.
AA Missiles- Neutral
BFG - Chaser
BFG - Mild
Rapid Fire Green - Harasser
Rapid Fire Red - Patterned Harasser
AA Gun - Punisher
AA Gun "Shotgun"- Punisher
Juggernaut - Huge rope-able rockets (WIP), maybe a cruise missile
Closed Playtests
We are getting closer and closer to doing some closed playtests. To set expectations, this build will be small and unpolished! Expect 2-3 missions, with no upgrades, story, etc. We are testing the core gameplay only.
We will be doing a survey within the next month to choose our initial group of testers. We will decide based on who we think will provide the most helpful feedback, but within those people priority will be given based on how early they signed up for the email list.
This first group will be quite small, 10 people. But we will increase this over time. As part of the playtesting we will open an invite-only part of our discord server. This will continue to grow and we plan to do a LOT of playtesting.
I've been excited to open the game up to external play testers, this is a big milestone for us!
