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.