Cleared Hot News

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.



[h2]Wtf is Not Knowing?[/h2]

"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.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
It is really annoying to have to see your own face on a youtube video.

Okay, back to the game !

[h2]We Are In Production[/h2]
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.

[h2]New Maps[/h2]

Our 3d artist, Mane, has been hard at work expanding the maps for the campaign. Here are some work in progress screenshots.







[h2]Vehicle Pathfinding[/h2]
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.



[h2]Play Tests[/h2]
We will do a large playtest event, with a selection of people from our email list within 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.

[h2]Thank You![/h2]
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

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.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

This is a series we are doing to explore the background story of the main character. No spoilers, I'll let you watch!



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.



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.



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.





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 all for your support! We are super busy and have a ton of new things coming up to show you.

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.


[h3]Enemy Spawner[/h3]

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.




[h3]Make the player go around [/h3]

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.




[h3]Make the player get close [/h3]

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.


[h2]The "oh sh*t" moment[/h2]

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.




[h3]"When The Wave Breaks Here, Don't Be There"[/h3]

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.


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.


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

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