Cleared Hot News

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*$@.

[h2]Defend the Satellite Dishes[/h2]
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.



[h2]Chaos[/h2]

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.



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.



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

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.



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...



[h2]Fixing Collisions with Many NPCs[/h2]

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.


Bonus gif.


Our playtest survey is going out to the email list this week! Sign up here if you haven't already: https://clearedhotgame.com/email-list/

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

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.



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.





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.

[h2]NPC Performance[/h2]

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.

[h2]Unity 6 Update[/h2]

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.



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
  

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.

The playtesters will be chosen from the email list. Sign up here if you haven't already: https://clearedhotgame.com/email-list/

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!

As always, thank you for your support.

- Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team

Hello faithful wishlisters, I have some big news: We have a publisher: Microprose!

Microprose has published well known games like Civilization, Xcom, and Falcon 4.0, and recently have been publishing a lot of flight + action games.

[h2]Announcement Trailer[/h2]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[h3]What this means for you[/h3]
The game is getting additional support, through development, launch, and after launch. So basically, the game will be better, and you can have a higher confidence in it.

[h3]What this means for Cleared Hot[/h3]
We get a lot more help, which allows for us to focus on the game. Microprose will help with funding, marketing, press outreach, translation / localization, along with some dev, art, and moral support.

[h2]New Content[/h2]

[h3]Enemy Strafing Runs[/h3]
We added a new enemy jet that does strafing runs on your position. It is especially challenging for our new mission where you need to carry some explosive containers back to your base.

You might want to change directions...

[h3]New Jungle Biome[/h3]
We redid the jungle biome with our new terrain system, including a dense tree canopy.
It's nice to see some more green

[h3]Quadcopter Prototype[/h3]
Why? Because on Saturday I drank two coffees and said f*ck it, I wonder if I can add a drone to the game. Maybe it will appear in a special mission or two. Yay or nay?

I can hear this gif

[h2]25 Years In The Making[/h2]

Signing with Microprose completes a story that started 25 years ago, when my mom bought me Falcon 4.0 and a joystick that BestBuy had mistakenly priced at $20.

Twelve year old me read that if you learned how to fly in the game, you could fly a real F-16. This gave me a feeling of agency in my kid-life that I had never felt before.

Well, I got home and the game didn't run on our PC. Aaand my vision sucks. Spoiler alert, I'm not a fighter pilot. But, I still read the manual and the feeling of agency stuck with me. I think a lot of us felt empowered by video games when we were young: they provided a challenge that we could tackle on our own.

So, it feels pretty f*cking crazy to be signing with Microprose, 25 years later. And you know what, I have all of you to thank for that (and my mom). Without your interest and wishlists, this would not have happened. Seriously, this is life changing for me. So thank you!

- Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team

Hello Pilots,

Since we last spoke, we've been hard at work on creating air drops, supply crates, using a new terrain tool.

Oh and if you're missing the gifs in this update, you have Steam to thank. I can't upload gifs larger than 1.2MB right now. So I guess we'll do a youtube video instead.



We were playing around w the idea that rescuing NPCs should give the player some kind of reward. At first, we tried just spawning health or ammo crates on the ground.

But then I realized that isn't the Cleared Hot way. We have physics.



[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Thank god for that physics pillar.

We updated the Ammo crates, and added a new Health crate to the game. We also added some UI indicators, that give the player info on what's in the crate.





Over the last months, I started to notice how clunky it was for our artist, Mane, to modify the terrain. It was a procedurally generated, which works great once you have it set up, but if you want to move a hill over by 10 feet... forget it. You have to regenerate the whole terrain.

This made it especially difficult to adjust levels for gameplay reasons. So on a whim, we decided to take a couple days to investigate a new tool and see if it would be better. I was pleasantly surprised.

You use "Stamps" to define terrain features, or vegetation, and it updates in real time.

800kB gif... you can't stop me, Steam

After experimenting, we replaced the terrain in our current Desert scene. It went really quickly, and gave us some more variation in surface and how we textured the ground.





I've learned that the quality of art you get from artists is directly proportional to the quality of their tools... Plus, iterating quickly is something all of us want (devs, 3d artists, sound... etc).

The screenshots from the Apache update already show the new terrain, with mountains in the background.


As always, thank you for your support. This game wouldn't be getting made without your interest and wishlists, so thanks.

I've been interacting with people who joined the email list, thanks for all your kind / excited emails. We're not far from starting to do some beta testing. More on that soon.

- Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team