Cleared Hot - Enemy Experiments

Feb 19, 2025

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 with some new missions to test the units in. What you see below is a result of that. These all will likely change before they show up in the actual campaign, but I feel our experiments were successful.

Barracks Building

Enemy Spawner

The barracks is our first "functional" building that spawns enemies, and can be destroyed. Well, it can spawn any kind of unit, so in the future we're thinking we might have different kinds: A hangar that spawns aircraft, or a tank hangar... etc.

Shielded Turret

Make the player go around

This turret takes no damage from the front, but is easy to kill from behind. We're using this as a level design tool to incentivize players to find the best way to enter a base. We may re-use this concept to have vehicles or enemies that have weak points or directional damage.

Underground Turret

Make the player get close

If you played enough desert strike, you learned to sit at the edge of the screen and lob rounds at enemies just outside their range. While I think this can be a viable strategy, we wanted to explore what it's like if you can't do that.

This turret is not damageable until it pops up. And it fires a couple missiles very quickly. Making you dodge the missiles if you want to destroy it.

Artillery / Mortar Enemy

The "oh sh*t" moment

We really like the jet enemy that telegraphs it's strafing run with a red warning area on the ground. We wanted to explore if we could do this with a ground enemy, in a different pattern.

You can also use this enemy to take out other enemies... Not sure how we will use this in the level design yet but I didn't want to prevent it from happening.

Machine Gun Telegraph Attack

"When The Wave Breaks Here, Don't Be There"

A lot of the machine gun units have a similar "meta" to defeat them: just fly fast around them. We wanted to make a unit that breaks that. This enemy aims ahead of you, shows a laser, and then fires a super powerful gun. It requires you to change direction at the right time.

It still needs a bit of tweaking, but I like the concept of being able to dodge machine gun fire like this. Dodging feels great in the game, so it is cool to see that we can expand that beyond missiles.

What Do You Think?

Remember that these are prototypes: They will go through some iteration and we will find a way to make them fit in the game world without feeling out of place.

This might also be a good time to talk about "realism". I see Cleared Hot being a game that reflects things from the real world, but bends them in a way that suits the gameplay.

In other words, all of our helos, weapons, enemies, are grounded in reality. They are doing things that are possible in the real world, but we will re-interpret them in the Cleared Hot world in order to give you a more fun experience. Whenever possible we will base units off their real world counter-part (real helos, weapons, missiles, etc), but in some cases we will borrow from real things and create something new.

I think this is a fine line. I usually rely on my gut feeling for this stuff. This game is inspired by all the games that I've played over the last 30 years, and my preference is to have things be "based in reality" but then modify that for gameplay.

Thank You

The team is kicking ass right now and every week we seem to be tackling something major. It's really motivating. I feel like our momentum is increasing.

The community of fans is equally incredible. Sometimes it's hard to believe. Thank you for all of your interest, your comments, emails, upvotes, etc. It's really appreciated and stokes the fire.

We still have a lot of work ahead of us but I think we're narrowing in on a really really fun experience to deliver for you all.

Thank you! More coming soon!