Community24 Jul 2026Flares, Geothermal Craters, and a Helicopter PollDearest pilots, join me again for a fireside chat about attack helicopters. Things at Cleared Hot HQ are going quite well. The jungle campaign is reaching a crescendo as we race through the final few missions of Chapter 2. Then begins the gauntlet of balancing, building a boss fight, QA testing, playtesting, and preparing to ship a major update. More on this later. Introducing Flares! Travis ha…
Pilots! Oh do I have an update for you. Let's get right into it. First, feast your eyes on this lush jungle scene. We've picked up production on chapter 2 and it is feeling great. Is that a rock or are you happy to see me We are working on a jungle mission that will involve destroying some key enemy locations along the coast, and liberating some weapons caches. The mission has a mix of bases wi…
Hello Fearless Pilots, I have a rare thing to present to you: an update release date: Chapter1B Drops on March 17th! Video Devlog If you prefer to digest you devlogs in video format, check out the below! Let me know what else you would like to see in these, I'm curious to try this new format. I'm new to YouTube but I want to share our dev progress- leave a comment, a like or subscribe if you wa…
Hello Pilots! Join me on this Saturday morning as I share what we've been up to since the holidays! New Jungle preview, new water, boats, and performance updates. Let's go... Jungle Preview Our revised jungle theme is coming together. We've been doing a ton of work finding the right style for the jungle that won't melt your GPU. We're not quite done optimizing but we're getting closer. The over…
Hi Everyone, I just wanted to say thank you again and give a recap of our first 2 weeks since launching Cleared Hot. I mean it when I say: the launch went better than any of us even dreamed of . Thank you all for the reviews. It was really a wild ride after we clicked the big green "RELEASE MY GAME" button. All of our long time fans hit Steam right away on launch, which catapulted is into the g…
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 la…
WE ARE LIVE Brave Wishlisters, our time has come !!! Cleared Hot is available for purchase on Steam . Wow. it is just barely sinking in for me. Go and enjoy this nostalgic experience we have crafted for you ! Ways You Can Help · Buy and review the game! Early reviews help us a ton. · Share it with your friends · Come celebrate on discord with us :) Thanks. Five years ago I was struggling with a…
Brave wishlisters, your day of glory is near! The team is busy slaying the dragon of "releasing a game". As a global team we are starting to merge into a single time zone, which is not good. But, we are almost done. And we're in the phase of, everything is f*$(ing awesome and it's actually motivating again. I am typing this devlog with my remaining 3 brain cells, on a Sunday after the team made…
Dearest Wishlisters, the time is finally here for me to share some news! Cleared Hot will be released into Steam Early Access on November 20th, 5am PST ! Release Date Trailer I am equal parts excited and terrified :D But I can't wait to let you guys see what we've been working on, and start the next chapter of the game. Early Access We chose to do Early Access for 2 reasons: · Letting the commu…
Dearest wishlisters, join me on this Saturday morning and feast your eyes on this big beautiful helicopter... THE CHINOOK! We had to improve our rotor wash FX just for this occasion. Will the Chinook break the game? Will it fit in the hangar? Shhh... it's all taken care of. (I think). It fits on the helipad at your home base, just barely. You might have to adjust the satellite TV after taking o…
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 y…
Thanks for playing the demo and giving us feedback! Releasing the demo was quite a milestone for us as a team, and for me personally. I started learning game dev in 2020. I've gone a LONG time without a public demo for anyone to play. Imagine the pressure of having 100,000 wishlists and releasing the first playable build! To my relief, people really really liked it. We have a lot of feedback on…
Play The Demo! We Are Live On Next Fest! Hello wishlisters and future current pilots! I hope you're enjoying the demo- we've been loving all your feedback in the demo survey and all your comments that you've posted on social media. If you haven't played the demo yet, go give it a try and send us your feedback! · Download the demo on our Steam page: Cleared Hot (Steam) · Join our Discord: · Fill…
It's happening !! Everybody stay f%*#ing calm! The demo is now available to download on our Steam page! How To Play · Download the demo on our Steam page: Cleared Hot (Steam) · Join our Discord: · Fill out the demo survey after you play: Cleared Hot Demo Survey (Google Forms) Thank You! Thanks for all your support- I know some of you have been here for years- and it means a lot. This has been a…
Hello Wishlisters- Today I bring you some behind the scenes news. We are renaming our studio from Cfinger Games to Not Knowing Corporation. Check out our new site: notknowing.com (Don't worry, game updates are coming too). Cfinger was (is?) my gaming nickname. It was granted to me by my high school friends in the days of CS 1.6. I named the company Cfinger Games because it felt personal, and we…
Hello brave wishlisters, welcome back to our humble devlog, where I put my heart and soul into 5MB gifs and curse at Steam for not allowing video. BUT. Today we have a video: Check out episode 1 of a series we're calling Gunship Dispatches. This is a series we are doing to explore the background story of the main character. No spoilers, I'll let you watch! Destruction! This is a very satisfying…
Hello Pilots, I better start writing this update because we have enough content for 3 devlogs and there are some really cool things I want to share. The general theme of the last couple weeks was "enemy depth". I want to make sure we've explored every archetype of enemy before we get too far on our campaign. So we theorized about which units to make, and then we whipped up some prototypes along…
Hello Faithful Wishlisters, I trust you've all recovered from your holidays and are back into the swing of things. So allow me to distract you for a bit with some Jungle flavored nostalgia. We wanted to explore what a wave defense mission would look like, inspired by none other than our game designer, Enzo. So he jumped in with both feet and made this mission "Jungle Mayhem", named so you know…
Hello Faithful Wishlisters, The snappiness and overall feel of Cleared Hot is one of my top priorities. The game was starting to drop fps in larger missions and it was time for a clean-up. Physics Ragdolls were the first order of business. Ragdolls Our NPCs use something called Active Ragdolls, to allow physics to interact with NPCs that are following animations. But calculating the physics for…
Welcome back faithful wishlisters, and hello to all the new people who discovered us last month! The Publisher announcement went better than I ever could've expected, with our Reddit post reaching the front page of all of Reddit! We were #6 on r/all for awhile, which is insane. Thank you all who commented or shared it with friends. And for your wishlists! 27,000 of you wishlisted the game in on…
Hello faithful wishlisters, I have some big news: We have a publisher: Microprose! Microprose has published well known games like Civilization, Xcom, and Falcon 4.0, and recently have been publishing a lot of flight + action games. Announcement Trailer What this means for you The game is getting additional support, through development, launch, and after launch. So basically, the game will be be…
Hello Pilots, Since we last spoke, we've been hard at work on creating air drops, supply crates, using a new terrain tool. Oh and if you're missing the gifs in this update, you have Steam to thank. I can't upload gifs larger than 1.2MB right now. So I guess we'll do a youtube video instead. Air Drops + Supply Crates We were playing around w the idea that rescuing NPCs should give the player som…
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Announcements are the developer’s own posts to the game’s Steam news feed: updates and their patch notes, in-game events, releases and sales. The important ones are marked on the players chart.