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