This is the first weekly devlog for Clearance Defence. The plan is simple: every week, write up what actually happened in development. No polish, no spin. Just what got built, what broke, and what we learned.
This week was a big one. Versions v0.18.0 through v0.23.0, and a lot of pieces falling into place.
Night 2 takes shape
The biggest milestone this week: Night 2 is playable from start to finish. There’s still balancing to do and art to finalise, but the full flow is in and working.
The week started with the enemy AI overhaul landing — squad behaviour, navigation improvements, and movement polish — followed by Night 1 being formally signed off with all 12 phases complete. That cleared the path for Night 2 to come together.
The new features that make Night 2 feel like a proper level:
- Pre-level briefing system — Commander Eggustus now briefs you before each night. Voice-over, objectives, the works. He takes it very seriously.
- Morning buffs — the Morning Truce cleanup phase now feeds back into gameplay. Clean up well and your units start the next night with buffs.
- Spawn highlights — enemy spawn points now flash gold before gnomes pour out, giving you a moment to check your defences are pointing the right way.
We also removed a set of wave barks (the little combat callouts during waves). They weren’t landing right. Better to have silence than dialogue that doesn’t fit the tone.
The Safe Zone panel, six times over
The Safe Zone UI got a complete rework this week. The panel uses a POS terminal theme — think retail checkout screen — and getting it to look right across every screen meant wrestling with nested container styling, background layering, and button themes that kept reverting to defaults.
The result: dark text on a beige terminal background, chunky retail buttons, consistent everywhere. One of those changes where you can’t tell anything happened unless you saw the before.
Steam deployment pipeline
We’ve been wrestling with SteamCMD (Steam’s command-line upload tool) for a while. This week we finally got it reliable.
The issues were all around authentication state — stale sessions, assertion errors during re-authentication, and paths that were subtly wrong in the build environment. After several rounds of fixes, we now have a single command that handles auth, builds, and uploads to Steam in one go.
Builds deploy to Steam properly. That’s one less thing between development and players.
What’s next
- Enemy AI continues to evolve — smarter pathfinding, more interesting breach behaviour
- Night 2 balancing and art polish
- Night 3 planning starts