Hey Sweepy Heads!
We're back with another Clean Sweep Devlog! If this is your first time here and you don't know what Clean Sweep is, let me tell you!
Clean Sweep is a comedic 3D character action RPG where everyone in Cleanland is a personification of a real world cleaning product! As the Town Janitor you'll befriend the residents of Cleanland and team up with them to fight germs!
This is Nelson, the lead programmer, once again writing the Devlog! With that said, we have some news… We are going on break!
Break
You might be asking, why right after starting the dev log? Trust me, we asked the same lol. Truthfully, we've been working on Clean Sweep all the way back in June 2023, and since starting the project, we have not taken a single, long break. As a small team working nonstop for over 2 years, we've become very burnt out, which might be an understatement. After putting on more responsibilities for the team, like a devlog, it became evident that we all need a break. Everyone has put in some insane efforts these past 2 years, and they deserve to rest.
Our break is from now until October 14th. We're taking 2 full months off so when we come back we can jump right back in and continue with our update plans. Speaking of…
Update Progress
We have been working on the Combat update and various other parts of the project so let's dive right into it!
Combat & Animation
We've reworked and are actively reworking some of the moves including:
Janitor's Hold Standard
It now bounces between enemies and flies more linearly on the initial throw (check the video below!). We also fixed bugs with the broom either not throwing or remaining visible in your hand when thrown.
Janitor's Special
It hasn't been finished yet, but we are fixing the vortex drawing in enemies to be less… violent on lower frame rates as well as rebalance the damage
Soap's Passive
You retain some slipperiness on swap now! When swapping off of Soap, it does drain slightly though. Enjoy slipping and sliding a lot more often
Charming's Hold Standard
It now has a minimum charge time
Revives
They actually work now! They aren't fully done yet, but they're almost done.
Hitboxes
They got a lot better internally! Knockback should be a little better and attacks overall are getting slightly modified
Germs
We've fixed some bugs on the germ AI including them not attacking you if they spawn inside of you. We've still got more to fix and big reworks coming later in the update
Do note that everything shown in the video is subject to change.
We've also added some new combat animations which can be seen above and are rebalancing a lot of the game. Additional combat plans include doing mocap! We have a mocap session planned for some time in August. We've made SEVERAL attempts of trying to record mocap and got hit with so many technical issues so please wish us luck… Patrick Luck (He's our lead animator)! If everything goes well then adding a new character may be a lot sooner than expected…!
Last thing! We're doing some playtesting! The initial update in the Combat update is almost ready for playtesting. If you'd like to be part of this, please join our discord! Official information about joining will be sent out a bit after we're on break. All that's left for us to do is some more balancing, finish off the initial reworks, and then we should be ready to playtest.
Audio
We had a meeting with Diego Somoza (@diegosomoza.music on instagram) who gave us some great music advice.
We also had our fantastic composer cooking it up in the studio with a new combat song. You can hear a preview of it in the combat video! The bassline goes hard af. He also made a mansion investigation theme. You can expect these in the new update.
Art
The Mansion Level 2 rework is currently in the works. It's unknown if it will make it into the Combat Update itself, but the level is in the process of being remodeled.
We've also got some images of the new item sprites our item team is cheffing up. Here's a few of them:
Don't those look scrumptious?
Finally, the tech art team has been reskinning Charming so we'll hopefully have our favorite barista-powerhouse be a lot less collapsed when attacking.
Developer Corner
Welcome to the Developer Corner! This is a space where we ask the developers of Clean Sweep a question. With the break coming up:
What are you most excited about doing during break?
Nelson
I am very excited to start working on some personal projects!
Jess
Working only ONE job instead of two! But mostly working on personal projects LMAO
Renee
Working on clean sweep.
Isn't it funny how all of our break time is going to be spent on working on something else? We really are a team of workaholics, lol. This has been your dev corner!
Assoapciate of the Month
As mentioned in our Devlog 00, we've had a very large number of Assoapciates work on the game. We wanted to highlight one of them every month to give you a little more background on who they are and what they do on the team. Our current Assoapciate of the month is Ethan Chau! He works on our writing team and is our longest serving Assoapciate to date. He currently is the main writer for Shawn and has written a lot of dialogue and quests. He's also our voice actor for someone who isn't out yet, so you'll just have to cope until you hear his stellar performance :)
Introduce yourself!
Hey y'all, I'm Ethan! I'm a writer who also isn't very good at spelling (Renee and I make a great team). I work with Fifty Birds as well on Sincerely, Robin!
If you were a janitor, what would you clean with?
A sword and parrying dagger but the blades are those barbed drain snakes. I think that would be cool. And useful. I have long hair that gets stuck in the drain.
What Clean Sweep food item do you want to eat?
Buffalo chicklint wings, for sure. I love buffalo chicklint. Mmmmmmmmmm.
If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be?
Longan. My family buys longan often, but I couldn't eat it growing up because it irritated my bad asthma. But now that I've outgrown the asthma, I love it. Also it's part of the soapberry family! (haha get it?)
Thank You
Thank you for reading our double oh one-th devlog! We'll be back with our next one after the break. You can find our dev log updates on our steam page or on itch! If you want to follow along with our game, check us out on our socials below!