Hello Faithful Wishlisters,
We are heads down on production but I wanted to give you a quick update on some new things! Gather round, it's time for some helicopter gunship gifs.
New Mission - Defending Friendly NPCs
One of the new missions involves helping your NPCs on the ground defend various targets. It's pretty cool to see the battle raging below you, and to help defend your units as best you can.
Yes, that guy did get run over... it just didn't fit in the 5MB gif limit
Convoy Mission
I'm pretty happy that we found a good spot for this mission. I know escort missions sometimes suck, but do they normally have flying trucks and mid-air missile explosions?!
My favorite feeling in helicopter games is being able to help the ground units fighting beneath you. I think that even goes way back to Desert Strike and being able to rescue people. It always felt unique.
So this was my motivation to want to have missions where you protect a convoy going from A to B across enemy territory. This one has a lot of ambushes and awesome physics moments.
It's a trap. Yes screenshake will be able to be turned off for those of you with a weak stomach :) It's maybe a bit much right now.
We even found a way to still allow using the rope during it. I was worried that players could just carry the trucks straight to the end- but by having 2 trucks, you can't carry one without risking the other one.
Anti-Tank Missiles
We added the concept of armored targets into the game. Currently these just reduce the damage done by 75% except for any anti-armor weapons, which will bypass this reduction. This allowed us to make the tank more powerful, but give the player anti-armor missiles.
These missiles launch slowly, but then accelerate towards the last target you were aimed at. They don't require any kind of lock, but we are considering adding that for a future missile type.
They feel quite powerful!
Manned Turrets
We developed the game with a passenger system that allows NPCs to get into vehicles, and we've recently been extending that to other units.
We had talked about how cool it would be to see NPCs running towards an anti-aircraft gun when the spot you. You would have the chance to kill them before they become "more powerful" by getting on the gun.
I'm happy to show that we've implemented that in our latest changes! In this gif you can see the NPCs running to get into the turret, and me killing them before they can get there. We are still balancing this and trying to determine how much damage the NPCs themselves should take once they're on the turret.
Don't let them get on the AA gun!
Once the NPCs get in the turret it becomes quite powerful, it shoots fast and packs a punch. The best strategy is to fly around behind it, since it can't rotate as fast as you can fly.
Our 3d artist Mane did a great job with this ZU23 model. It's an older soviet AA gun. We are working to make things grounded in reality- it feels like this would be some cold war era hardware that has been passed around a bit.
Those chairs don't look super comfy
NPCs Inside Buildings
Our NPCs can go inside vehicles and turrets, why shouldn't they go into buildings? And if they were inside the buildings, they would probably come out when the building is getting destroyed...
Knock knock
For some reason this gave me nostalgic memories of Strike games and also... Rampage. You would punch holes in buildings and discover what was inside, and it was a mix of good and bad things. Godzilla / Cleared Hot crossover title? Final Boss?
Just don't eat the toaster (or toilet)
We are building a mission right now focused mostly on destroying enemy bases, and having each destroyed building have a chance at giving an ammo or health crate. I wanted to see what it would be like if enemy NPCs came running out as you destroyed the buildings.
Trick or Treat?
Gamescom
Our publishing partner MicroProse was at Gamescom showing off the Cleared Hot demo this past week! We got a lot of good feedback from players and press.
Thank You!
Thank you again for your continued support, you guys are the best. I've been trying to keep up with your comments in Steam Community, Youtube, Email, etc. Really cool to get everyone's feedback and hear how much you've enjoyed the demo.
If you haven't followed our new company account on Twitter / X, you can do that here: https://x.com/notknowingcorp We have been posting pretty often there.
There's a lot more I wish I could talk about! I will post another update soon. We updated our release year in Steam to 2025 soooo... things are happening. We still have a lot of work to get through, but I can't wait to talk about it soon.
We are waiting a bit longer to release a demo update in order to keep our pace on production, but you can look for that soon as well.
Thanks for following along!
- Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team