Dearest players + wishlisters! THANK YOU. Holy moly what a launch week.
First, if you would be so kind, please nominate us for the "Sit Back and Relax Award" category in the Steam Awards. Or whatever other categories you want. If you feel like it. Link Here.
Thanks. Okay, on to the launch stuff.
Launch Recap
The night before the launch I set 2 alarms to make sure I didn't sleep past our 5am launch. I slept about 2 hours before I started waking up thinking I'd missed it.
So I just got up, and we prepared for the release. At about 4:52am we pressed the scary green "Release Now" button.
The 3 of us who were awake at the time made peace with our god/s and RELEASED IT.
To our amazement, pretty much everything went well. You guys turned up in droves to buy + review the game, our Discord blew up, the Reddit post made it to the top of r/gaming...
I think the thing we're most proud of is the review score. At the time I'm writing this, we're at 98% positive with 1,141 reviews, after 6 days. Whaa?! That's so crazy.
Updates + Next Steps
I'm proud to say we've already shipped 2 updates. These fixed a variety of bugs and improved performance on mission 10.
Already Fixed
Hotfix 1 and Hotfix 2 fixed the below issues.
Fix: Improved performance in Mission 10: Data Harvesting.
Fix: Improved performance of jet enemy on all missions
Fix: When rescuing or delivering people made them invulnerable to prevent accidental deaths when dropping them
Fix: Tweaked volume and frequency of scientist barks
Fix: Fixed how instructions were shown for controls that have positive and negative axis (ex: altitude control)
Fix: Made chickens a priority target for the rope
Fix: Fixed ally npcs entering the van and breaking the objectives (Data Harvesting)
Fix: Fixed dialog overlap in dialog when killing humvee (Tail Risk)
Fix: Fixed music in The Battle of Big Rocks
Fix: Added explicit drop zone in The Long Way Home
Fix: Fixed some texts that were using a font without support for localization
Fix: Fixed main fonts using fallback for cyrilic characters
Fix: Added code to prevent issues when the options or savegame can't be loaded
Fix: Fixed gas tank from "An Odd Tool for Odd Jobs" that was not blowing up when using the Easy of Custom difficulty options to lower Ally damage.
We are hard at work addressing all of your feedback, so keep it coming.
Near Term Fixes
Below is a list of some of the things we are planning to address in the near future.
Changes to get the Steam Deck certification
Cloud save
Various logic issues in missions
Convoy mission bridge fix (no spoilers lol)
Some issues with rescuing NPCs
Issue w missile crate in "Holding Out For a Hero" mission
Instructions for the "come-back shield"
Instructions for switching missiles
Better feedback when you try to shoot missiles but are out of ammo
Various small weapon / helo price + stat tweaks
Minigun overheat changes
force a cool down, don't penalize player from clicking when weapon is overheated
Small performance improvements (bigger ones coming later)
Various bug fixes
Chapter 1a
We aim to ship Chapter 1a before Christmas. This includes:
Bug fixes
Expanded test flight area
Comanche helo added
Balance adjustments
Thank You.
Thanks to all of you for making this a dream come true for us. We were joking the day after about how it felt like a dream- what if we woke up the next day and hadn't launched yet :) But really, it has been better than we even thought possible.
I feel very motivated by all the momentum, and the team is pretty excited to show you what we can do for the next updates, and remaining chapters of the game.
Keep leaving us feedback on Discord: https://discord.gg/XmMTqEjpQg
Join our email list to get more detailed updates: https://www.clearedhotgame.com/email-list
Vote us for "Sit Back and Relax Award" on the Steam Awards: https://store.steampowered.com/steamawards/nominations/2025
Thank you!
- Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team