Hello 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 us 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, that programmer tech-y guy or something here to bring you all the info from these past 2 months. We've gotten rid of a lot of bugs (and germs), and we're ready to get started with pushing out our first combat update soon!
Progress
Programming
In March, we showed off our game at the Boston Game Dev Demo Night! We had a lot of great encounters with people and received a lot of very useful and insightful feedback. To everyone who played our game, thank you so much! We hope you enjoyed it. Everyone there got to get a taste of our new World Encounter System!
We've talked about it previously, but our World Encounter System has been getting more and more refined. We've been cleaning it up, making sure that there's no bugs or issues whatsoever with it. A majority of our work so far has been refining this system and cleaning up a lot of bugs, combat or non-combat. For example, NPC dialogue should loop now, so you won't get stuck getting the same dialogue 3 times in a row when trying to advance a quest for an NPC that has multiple quests active. We've also fixed some FXP bugs including FXP not being split properly. Now, even if a character is close to max level, FXP will still split appropriately, so say hello to FXP finally being properly distributed!
We did have a bit of our project break though 😅. Updating to Perforce has been amazing… minus all of the bugs it brought including deleting a lot of our macros from graphs and causing bugs where we've had none before. Overall, we've been searching for and fixing a good chunk of these bugs. We're looking at a May release date for our first combat update! As a bit of a recap, here's all of the major new additions:
We've redone how damage is calculated including making some stats actually functional and making combat feel more balanced
We've reworked a number of moves (small and large) including the Janitor's Broomerang, the Beaunado, Soap's Passive, Soap's Special, and Charming's Hold Standard.
We've rebalanced germs and character damage overall
We've fixed a majority of existing combat bugs including controllers eating inputs and special being called every time you swap to the Janitor.
We've added revives!
We've added the new World Encounter System and Party Loadouts
And more!
There were a lot of core changes within this update, so the next combat updates should hopefully not take as long as this one did. Do expect some bug fixes following the release of our first combat update!
Design
A good chunk of our design time was spent looking at and refining the World Encounter System. We've played through them, balanced them, and have hopefully come up with a good system. We're also looking into balancing FXP. Right now, leveling up is really easy. It works, but we want to ensure that levels can be a bit more balanced and you won't need to do 2-3 combats to get to the current max level.
Animation
Animation has been animating and is currently working on Soap! Soap has gotten retopologized and UVed with animations currently being worked on. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like we will be able to get any new animations in before the first update, but we are eagerly looking forward to putting the new Soap animations in soon!
Art
In the art department, the germs took over my PC and forced me to help create their own devlog image last month. I tried my best to make it up to their standards. For this month's devlog image, Jess created it in celebration of our 1 year anniversary of releasing our demo! We will have a speed paint uploaded soon for this along with the previous devlog images!
In game environmental art news, we've greyboxed a new version of the Plaza! As is standard in Unreal, the first version that Jess created had crashed and been lost to time… Such is fate. But the new version is coming together as we begin testing out spacing, feel, and combat in the new environment! We're also renovating the mansion! For the immediate future, new props have been discussed and planned as well as giving mansion level 1 a face lift. Exciting! Finally, Jess has been hard at work practicing a new painterly style for textures that we're hoping to use. Expect some big visual changes in the future of Clean Sweep!
And last, but not least, thank you to everyone who voted on the new Lysa redesign! We've gotten a lot of feedback across our Instagram and Discord and the people have decided. The winning Lysa redesign is 3a which you can see below. For everyone who liked 3b, we may be including it as a palette swap in the future! If you'd like to vote on any future character redesigns or give feedback on any new content we may create, make sure to follow our Instagram and join our Discord server. You can find the links at the bottom of this devlog.
Audio
Eric has created some outros to finalize our new combat tracks. In our next combat update, you can expect to hear both of the new combat tracks in rotation. We've teased them, and they are 100% certified bangers.
Writing
The writing team has been writing. Yep. They've been writing quests for some already existing characters as well as some of the future characters we will continue to gatekeep *insert evil laughter*. They've also been expanding a lot more of the world of Cleanland, writing more interactions with items in the world, brainstorming and helping finalize a redesign for the plaza, and working on more Cleanland Chronicle news articles. They've dedicated a lot of time to adding more character development to the NPCs and working on the previously mentioned Town Janitor welcome event! That should be included in a future update.
I also met with the writing team and went over Perforce, so now they can go and implement everything themselves. Because they are strong independent writers who don't need no programmers. Unless everything starts breaking. Which happens. A lot. Unreal moment.
The Mansion has also been a focus for the writers, creating a quest for Mansion Level 1 as well collecting reference images for the mansion interior and exterior. As mentioned in art, the mansion is getting a face lift. Charming's event 1 will also be getting a fun tweak in the future to hopefully help communicate a little more on how the world works, so stay tuned for that!
Production
As previously mentioned, we were able to show off our game at the Boston Game Dev Demo Night! Again, a huge thank you to everyone who came by and played our game. It was great getting to talk to everyone and showcase what we've been working on for the past year. Speaking of, it's been 1 year that the Clean Sweep Demo has been released! To celebrate, we all had strawberry shortcake (or in my and Ethan's case strawberry shortcake flavored popcorn). You can check out the post on our Instagram.
In other news, I took a break. Just a short 3 week break, but I am back and motivated to continue development, starting with finishing off this update. While I was gone, Mia took over as our main programmer, and did a phenomenal job. So everyone say, "Thank you Mia!"
And for our final production news, the IRS took our souls (and money). We had to pay taxes for the first time, and that sucked. Why are taxes so complicated? What is the government doing with our money? Why can't they just tell us how much money we owe? Why tax us? We only make a quirky cleaning game; stop taking our money :(
Dev Corner
This month's Dev Corner question: What movie title best describes your experience working on Clean Sweep?
Jess
Everything Everywhere All At Once… and A Series of Unfortunate Events (shoutout voice acting week 2, iykyk)
Nelson
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Going through old code we initially wrote with not much of an understanding in Unreal constantly feels like this.
Renee
It's Kind of a Funny Story. Adding onto Jess's shout-out for VA week 2: Dukes of Hazard.
If there's something you're gleaming to ask the Clean Sweep devs, join our discord linked below and submit a question!
Assoapciate of the Month
The Assoapciate of the month is Jeff!
Introduce yourself!
Hi! Name’s Jeff and I help with the game’s 3D props every once in a while, with the work I do ranging from modeling to texturing. There’s nothing much about me other than I draw in my free time and I’m a big aficionado of anything giant robots or a certain blue hedgehog. I’ll try my best to keep helping out with Clean Sweep’s props and models as time goes on!
If you were a janitor, what would you clean with?
I’d have two bars of soap on ropes and each one of them would be tied to my hands like boxing gloves/brass knuckles.
What Clean Sweep food item do you want to eat?
I would want to eat definitely [chicklint tendies]
I am a fiend for wings
If you were a fruit, what fruit would you be?
I think I would be either an apple or a banana because those two are the only fruits I eat consistently
Thank You
Thank you for reading this Clean Sweep Devlog! You can find devlog updates on our Steam page or on itch.io. If you want to follow along with our game, check us out on our socials below.