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 what to change, improve, and all that, but I think the core takeaway for me was: We are on the right track. That is SUCH a good feeling.
Thank you for completing the survey as well- this data is super helpful for us. We are working on prioritizing game changes + future features based on your requests.
We got a lot of feedback from people that- while they liked the demo- they missed having larger missions that were less scripted. We are adding a mission to the demo that will serve as our experiment with large missions. Once this is released, we want your feedback on how it feels.
The goal here is to explore some slightly large game loops that require the player to plan a bit: do I want to take on this next base, or do I want to go find health or missile ammo first? Is that missile crate guarded by enemies worth the risk?
We have added a first implementation of this, and will include it in the next build. This is part of our goal of introducing larger missions.
We are planning to make the dodge more useful, but with a more limited use. More info on this later.
A lot of people mentioned not being sure where the helicopter was, especially when being shot by the enemy jet. We are going to work on making the ground indicator show on the water, and look into some other ways to make this better.
This was the control scheme in the Strike series- so It makes sense. We are tracking this and going to do some playtesting with adding this as an option.
We have started the technical work to localize all the text in the game and will have it translated to a first set of languages soon.
We're tracking a number of things here, a lot of these options are planned and won't be very difficult to add.
Option for minimal UI
Disable screen shake
Blood toggle
Adjusting UI position on ultrawide monitors
Some fixes for the profanity filter options
Better button binding- we will expose the movement buttons and fix some issues
The above list is just what we're focusing on in the near term. We are categorizing the rest of your feedback and tracking it for the full game. So if you didn't see your request above, don't worry.
Along with the demo, we finally opened up our public discord. We will post changelogs and more details there: Discord Invite Link
Huge thanks to everyone for playing. We hope to deliver more to you soon!
- Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team