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.
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