Happy New Year ! I'd like to thank you all again for your support. Two years ago I announced Cleared Hot, and the reception has been incredible. I still feel so lucky to be working on this game.
There has been a lot happening in the last few months. I think we're getting close to a beta build that we can start sending out for feedback. Not quite there yet, but closer. Let's get right into it.
Passenger System
One of my favorite parts of the game is being able to carry soldiers around in the helicopter. I loved doing this in Battlefield, and RS2 Vietnam. There's something about flying into enemy territory and dropping off soldiers as you dodge enemy fire. Maybe its because the stakes are higher, or the teamwork, or both.
The Passenger System in Cleared Hot needed to be updated after my last NPC system update. It actually came back together pretty quickly.
The other key part of this is that the NPCs can shoot from the helicopter.
And yes, the guy riding shotgun is shooting across the pilot! I think for the time being the pilot doesn't have any way to register damage, so you're safe. :)
The cool thing about this is, it's only a small tweak to how the NPCs typically find and shoot enemies. So they maintain all their same properties while flying in the helicopter: they just look and shoot at whoever they can see.
It feels pretty good- they tend to spot enemies that you didn't see, and they actually get a lot of kills. This makes me REALLY want to add a blackhawk with a door-gunner.
Bugs
No new feature is without it's quirks :) Right now the NPCs run full-tilt towards the helo when it lands, and they don't check if it's full until they arrive. The result is, they run into the side of the helicopter at full speed.
Future Additions
Another update we can include eventually is a better way to sort out which seat they run towards. Right now they all query the helo at the same time, and then all run towards the same seat. They get distrubed evenly once they arrive, but it would be cooler if they could understand that the guy infront of them is going to get the closest seat first, and adjust their target.
I want to explore having a "squad" in missions that you can also upgrade and equip separately from the helicopter. The gameplay is so fun that I think it's worth trying some new directions.
Ariel Joins the Team
I'd also like to announce a new member of the team: Ariel Coppes. He's working on the development side along with me. He joined the team towards the end of 2023 and has been making my life infinitely better since. After working solo on the code for so long it's incredible to have some backup.
Ariel has 14 years experience making games and we have similar development and teamwork values. He's been team lead and lead engineer on some larger teams, and has a lot of experience improving the tools and workflow of those games. Even being a small team he's already implemented some tools that make our development faster. Check out Ariel's work and blog here: https://arielcoppes.dev/
When you start your own project, you gain a lot of learning opportunities, since you get to work on everything, but you also lose the ability to learn from a team. As the team grows I'm stoked to be able to learn from others more often.
Thank You
Thanks again for your support. Things are gaining momentum, I can't wait to share more updates with you soon.
I want to hear from you! Any questions or ideas? Email me: [email protected]