I recognize it’s been a while since we’ve given the community a proper update. There is no doubt in any of our minds that we should be aiming for more consistency with this kind of communication, and while we have our long list of excuses, shedding some light on what the team currently has going on as well as what we have in store will hopefully clear up some of the frustrations you guys rightfully have.

State of Development

Fortunately, there aren’t any internal issues or fights holding back progress on CH or PNH. On the contrary, the development and art teams have been making leaps and bounds towards what we set out for v22, and as much as I’d like to clue you in on what we have planned, I’ll be leaving that out of this post so I can get it out as soon as possible.

Current Objectives

Right now there are three main goals for the CH team. The first two are related to development of the game itself; several of the programmers along with the majority of the artists are currently working on Clone Hero, while Exile, Matt, and I are also working part time on the massive overhaul that is PNH. As I mentioned before, v22 is well on its way to release, and while I will leave it to Matt or the other devs actually working on it to give a final date, I can promise with certainty that you will be hearing more about it by the end of the month.

In our meeting yesterday, we set out several tasks for our new community management roster, the first of which was to push our firstly monthly development blog by the 31st. This is our third, latest, and longest overdue objective: to be better about our relationship with the community.

The Community Team

While transparency is something we have always valued in principle, putting pen to paper requires much more effort in practice than in theory. Effort that, especially for the people who are working on the game, feels more productive redirected towards coding and designing rather than drafting and editing. While we wish we had the resources to take the team full time, it’s simply not feasible. As such, we have to make due with everyone’s time constraints, external commitments, and periods of burnout. Thus, as development time runs thin, we have a tendency to put off tasks not directly involved in the next version of the game such as development updates in favor of trying to grind out code and assets.

This is where the community team comes in. Now, this is not to say that we’ve never had a community team, and when I mention “new roster”, it also doesn’t mean you won’t be missing the faces you might already recognize. Perhaps the best way to put it is that instead of grandiose, big-pictures ideals like “connect to the community” and “build better relationships”, we are refocusing our managers on concrete goals, such as maintaining the development blog, running Q&A sessions, shitposting on social media, and maybe even setting up developer streams (or something crazy like that).

Before the end of the month, we’ll be introducing you to everyone on the community team, and discussing their specific goals to keep the community in touch.

Wrapping Up

All things said and done, I am absolutely looking forward to the future of Clone Hero. We’ve made a lot of progress and are admittedly still working out all the kinks, but here’s hoping you guys will be blown away by what’s still to come. Expect more from us, and expect it soon! We’ll be responding to comments whenever we’re around :)

Noah Kim and the Clone Hero Team

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