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 some kind of reward. At first, we tried just spawning health or ammo crates on the ground.
But then I realized that isn't the Cleared Hot way. We have physics.
Watch on YouTube
Thank god for that physics pillar.
We updated the Ammo crates, and added a new Health crate to the game. We also added some UI indicators, that give the player info on what's in the crate.
New Terrain System
Over the last months, I started to notice how clunky it was for our artist, Mane, to modify the terrain. It was a procedurally generated, which works great once you have it set up, but if you want to move a hill over by 10 feet... forget it. You have to regenerate the whole terrain.
This made it especially difficult to adjust levels for gameplay reasons. So on a whim, we decided to take a couple days to investigate a new tool and see if it would be better. I was pleasantly surprised.
You use "Stamps" to define terrain features, or vegetation, and it updates in real time.
800kB gif... you can't stop me, Steam
After experimenting, we replaced the terrain in our current Desert scene. It went really quickly, and gave us some more variation in surface and how we textured the ground.
I've learned that the quality of art you get from artists is directly proportional to the quality of their tools... Plus, iterating quickly is something all of us want (devs, 3d artists, sound... etc).
The screenshots from the Apache update already show the new terrain, with mountains in the background.
Thank You
As always, thank you for your support. This game wouldn't be getting made without your interest and wishlists, so thanks.
I've been interacting with people who joined the email list, thanks for all your kind / excited emails. We're not far from starting to do some beta testing. More on that soon.
- Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team