Dev Blog #1: A New Hope
Our second attempt at our First dev blog! On twitter the community overwhelmingly voted in favor for us to start a blog series devoted to the game’s development. Thanks for the continued support everyone!
To start things off, this first blog entry will be going over our tentative future plans for this game. We want to be transparent with the community as to where we see this game going in the future so we’re all on the same page. A quick disclaimer though, these plans and ideas are subject to change. Just because something is mentioned here that doesn’t mean everything is set in stone, so please don’t hold a grudge if something you really want doesn’t make it into the final game.
The future of Clone Hero
Since we released v.20 we have been mainly focusing on figuring out where to go next, and formulating our plans for the future. When Srylain started working on the game back in 2012, he never expected the project to grow to the size it has. Much of the code was ported across from his original xna project to unity which has certainly caused growing pains and some issues. The big news here, in order to make the game more extendable for the future and make it easier for us to add larger features we are starting fresh. We will however continue to support Clone Hero with mainly small quality of life improvements and bug fixes, just don’t expect anything huge as we are mainly focusing on the new project. The new game we are working on will have a new name, new assets, and new code. We will announce the new name closer to the initial beta release of the game.
Features
We want to confirm some commonly requested features, that will be included in the new game so we can hopefully cut down on how often they get requested.
Where is drums support? Yes… yes we are going to be having support for other types of instruments. Drums is a given, and we are aiming to get support in much earlier than clone hero, but there are others as well such as vocals, dance pads, and keys. Not all of these will be there on release, but we are certainly considering them.
Will you have online? We have been thinking a lot about this, and we have some very large plans here that should really surpass everyone’s expectations. We will be having an account system for the game. This account will be used for global leaderboards, friends lists, and online multiplayer, offline play should continue to work without an internet connection.
What about mac support? Yes!
In addition, we are looking into ideas for different kinds of competitive game modes, something that has been missing from these kind of games for a long time. Better game personalization is something else we would love to include. This may include different asset packs included with the game, or ways to customize colors. We also think it would be amazing if player customizations(note lane colors for example) would be visible in online multiplayer, however this would likely prevent us from supporting fully custom user themes.
Setlist
Another huge thing we are currently working out is our official setlist. This has been on our trello page for a long time, but hasn’t been talked about a lot. We have already been in talks with a decent amount of artists, whether they be Internet based creators, solo artists, and artists under record labels. We are very excited about where this is going in the future. We will be releasing the game with a standard setlist and may continue to release songs afterwards if we can. The specifics here are not yet set in stone though, and will likely change as development continues.
Other Updates
The Team
Everyone should be familiar with the existing development team of srylain, mdsitton, and the artists Toasty, Inventor, and Filyng. So we are going to focus on all the new faces here.
Firstly we would like to thank JasonParadise for really being there for us. He has been invaluable help in guiding Zero on the community management side of things, plus has had some really amazing insight on just about everything. He is someone who we are so grateful to have on the team, and look forward to working with more as time goes on.
As far as development team members, we have so many new faces, some you may know and recognize as well. So far we have got Exile, the mastermind behind GH3+, Olmee, someone who was working on a Rock Band style game with beautiful animations in the menus and just looked fantastic. We got Zerotica, the man behind the CHLauncher, because he has offered to work with us for a long time, and has always been trying to create something for the community, without trying to step on our toes and we appreciate that.
We also can’t forget Kolatara and PoisonedPanther. Kolatara made some pretty nifty Minecraft mods back in the day. Panther has been developing our Discord bot for a bit now, as well as had his own Twitch request bot for the game, but his shining achievement is practically single handedly developing Doki mode for v.20. Last but certainly not least for the game’s development team, we got Chibi. Chibi is the mastermind you can thank for designing the photoshops that eventually became Doki mode in Clone Hero.
Official Stance on Modding
We do want to address some rumors that have been going around throughout the community though. After the events of some members trying to push the main community into modding the game, we had to put some more strict rules into place. We have not, and will not ban anyone for discussing modding the VISUALS of the game. If you want to do that, go ahead, we will not assist you however if your game breaks, just like with Zerotica’s mod, as we don’t know what you might have done. Any bans that were handed out that might have been in the same discussion about mods, were due to the members harassing staff and ignoring the rules set in place. Also, since the release of score saving, members in the community have been very vocal about being able to mod their game to change scores. We understand that and when moving forward we will make sure that after we set up the new security measures that will help protect the scores. That being said, if you promote that you are modding the code or anything other than visuals, you will be talked to. If you mention that you want to make your mod public, or tell people how to do it, you will most likely be banned. Please don’t ruin the game for others by trying to condone breaking things we have been working hard on for you guys.
Hopefully you’ve made it this far, thanks for everyone’s support over the past year and lets hope we can continue on from here for many many more to come. We will be continuing to make more dev blogs over the next few months, so stay tuned!