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.
Wtf is Not Knowing?
"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.
It is really annoying to have to see your own face on a youtube video.
Okay, back to the game !
We Are In Production
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.
New Maps
Our 3d artist, Mane, has been hard at work expanding the maps for the campaign. Here are some work in progress screenshots.
Vehicle Pathfinding
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.
Play Tests
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.
Thank You!
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