Clone Drone in the Danger Zone - JoshFTL
Hello Humans!

We are announcing the Clone Drone in the Danger Zone Level Editor Competition!

Enter the competition for a chance to win an exclusive emote and the admiration of the whole community!

What is the theme of this competition?
LAUNCH!

Because the game is coming out on July 27th, we thought this was appropriate.

Level Editor Competition Rules

What kind of levels are allowed?
The theme for the competition is Launch! That means anything to do with releasing Clone Drone, jumping, bouncing, spaceships blasting off, or whatever you can imagine is allowed.

The level MUST BE UPLOADED AS A CHALLENGE. We won’t play the level if you upload it as an Endless Mode level. You can find how to upload it to the Steam Workshop as a Challenge Mode level here https://support.doborog.com/l/en/clone-drone/uploading-levels-to-the-steam-workshop#uploading_a_challenge.

We also reserve the right to remove any levels we decide are inappropriate from the competition.

Who can join?
Anyone! You will need to own Clone Drone in the Danger Zone and be able to create and add levels to the Steam Workshop.
When do I have to submit my level?
Submissions will close at Midnight on Monday July 5th. Please use this form https://inj5jehpdl0.typeform.com/to/y0i1H7dg to send us your level so we can easily find it. Once you have completed that form, you are done and the level will be considered for a prize!
How will Doborog judge the levels?
We will play them and you will be able to watch that happen on twitch.tv/gamingftl after submissions close. Once we have played them all we will pick our favourites in the following categories:
  • Most Creative Mechanic
  • Most Beautiful
  • Best use of Animation
  • Best use of Vertical Space
  • Most Epic Launch
  • Funniest Level
We will also create a list of levels for the community to vote on. The Community Prize will go to the level that gets the most votes from all of you!

How will community voting work?
Once the submissions have closed, we will put a short list of levels in a collection for everyone to play. Once you have played them all you can vote for your favourite. We will post a form with all of the levels which you can use to vote!
What will the winners get?

“Good luck, have fun!”
There will be a special emote for the winners of the prize! “Good luck and have fun” will only go to winners picked by Doborog and the winner of the Community Prize. The only way to get it is through competitions like this!

That’s not all, anyone that votes in the Community Prize will receive the “Everyone is a winner when you have fun!” Emote!

We hope that you will all enjoy creating levels and are excited to see what you build.

Happy editing!
Josh
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone - JoshFTL
Hello Humans!

We can finally share the good news that:
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone will leave Early Access on the 27th of July 2021!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tqS-lbSycY
Everyone will be able to complete the Story mode in Chapter 5!
  • Fly a spaceship.
  • Fight the Emperor.
  • Save Humanity.

Thanks for all your support and best of luck in the Danger Zone!

Josh
- Community Manager
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone - JoshFTL
Hello Humans!

We are happy to announce an Official Last Bot Standing tournament!
On the 28th of May at 8am PST / 11am EST / 4pm BST join us on twitch.tv/doborog to watch the competition!

This is the first time we've ever organised a tournament so we want it to be as fun as possible for everyone. This is a PC only event because the console versions are still waiting to be approved but we hope you will enjoy playing and watching.



When is it?
Join the community and compete in a battle royale! It will be streamed LIVE on twitch.tv/doborog on the 28th of May at 8am PST / 11am EST / 4pm BST.
Anyone can sign up, there is no number of wins or skill level needed. All you need is the game on Steam to play multiplayer and Discord. We will need you to join our Doborog Discord to send messages and organise everyone during the tournament.
If you would like to join, fill in this form and make sure you are free on May 28th for about 2 to 3 hours.
A special guest!
Commentatron and Analysis-Bot will be on holiday so the tournament will be hosted by our own community manager JoshFTL and special guest MattShea!

What is the Prize?
There can only be ONE WINNER. They will receive a unique emote to show what they have achieved.


Erik is working hard on the new emote!

A celebration? A brag? Both?

But don’t worry, if you are part of the tournament, you too will get something special.
Join the Community!
If you’d like to practice before the day, why not join the community tournament Discord? Lots of people get together to duel and play Last Bot Standing mode together competitively. They inspired us to create an official event so a huge thank you to them! https://discord.gg/XwpYb3VRN3



We can't wait to see the battle!

- Doborog Team
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone - bribrobot

Doborog Team explaining why console review is taking longer than expected
(thanks hoverfish2 for sharing this meme template on Reddit r/CloneDrone)


Helloooo humans!

We just released a teeny update on Steam! It includes some important preparation for our full console release to support crossplay 🤫

We also want to share an update on our console review progress to hopefully help answer the question... “why is there no release date yet, foolish indie game developing humans?!?”

Upgrades to Support Crossplay

Let's start with something invisible! This release includes an update to our networking library that will allow us to support crossplay on consoles. That means you will be able to play with your friends, even if they’re on a different platform (which is inferior to your favorite gaming platform, of course 😛).

Some More Bug Fixes!

While the server already kicks AFK players from co-op games, it will now kick them even if other players are playing while ignoring them. This will occur after 30 minutes of no input in public game servers, so stay active if you want to keep your endless streak going!

In exciting Not Crashing News™... after months of investigation, we solved a multiplayer crash that sometimes happened after joining games! Thanks to everyone who sent in descriptions of their crash scenarios to our bugs email. These are super helpful for our bugfixing!

Chapter 5 & console porting release update



While we heard from other devs that simultaneous releases with crossplay support are tough, we didn’t expect quite how long it would take! Rest assured we’re doing everything we can to get the game fully released on all the consoles as soon as we can. For example, when new bugs come in from the console platform reviewers, we drop everything, fix them, and submit a new build immediately. While the console review process takes longer than our usual Steam release cycle, and it can be frustrating for us too, we hope crossplay with our console friends will be well worth it!

For anyone interested, here's what the console process looks like: we prepare a build, then the console platform QA team tests and finds any issues. We then fix them and submit another build. Then they find fewer, smaller issues, we fix them, and when they finally don’t find any more issues... we can set a release date!

Review rounds have taken longer on some consoles because of reduced QA capacity during COVID. Given this, it’s been extra hard to predict exactly how long we’ve had left. Since the discovered issues are becoming fewer and lower-impact, we’re hopeful we’ll be able to lock down and announce a release date soon. That said, there’s no way for us to know exactly how many issues remain for them to find... and how many more review cycles it will take! We're crossing our fingers, and we will keep you all updated!

That’s it for this teeny bugfix update! We have some other fun things planned before launch, too, if you want to follow along:


Clean clean clean,
Brian & the Dobogang
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone - Doborog Games
Hello humans!

We just pushed a tiny update live, improving server stability!

Recently we've received some reports of servers getting into a bad state where players get booted back to the title screen without being able to join the game, with the server sitting around in this terrible state.

With the update servers will now automatically shut down:
  • After 20min of nobody sending any valid input.
  • Immediately after 5 clients disconnect AND nobody has sent any valid input during that time.
Note that standing around without moving counts as valid input, and will not shut down the server.

Thanks for your patience, and let us know if you encounter any other strange errors! <3
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone - Doborog Games
Hello humans!

Are you looking forward to Chapter 5? Us too!

We're currently fixing the last bunch of bugs on consoles, and as soon as the console QA teams stop finding bugs (they are very good at it!) we will lock down a launch date and do a happy robot dance!

One upside of it taking slightly longer than expected is that we've had a lot of time to fix bugs in the Steam version of the game too!

Here's what the latest little update includes:

Nerfed Infantry Command Bot!

We looked at the data, and noticed that Infantry Command Bots are responsible for a looooot of lost clones in Endless Mode. One Diamond level in particular with only 3 Infantry Bots on average ate up 2.81 clones before being defeated!

So we made the following little changes:
  • Reduced the max number of enemies spawned by a single Infantry Bot from 2 to 1.
  • Made them not back up as much while doing the spawning.
  • Removed the laser raptor from the higher difficulty spawn list.
Let us know what you think of these changes!

Bug fixes
We also fixed a lot of bugs! Here are the main ones:
  • Invisible Enemies in Co-op! It turns out the Infantry Command Bot was responsible for this happening, so we decided to just remove the levels where they appear from co-op for now. They weren't in that many levels, so the slight loss of variety should hopefully not be felt too much.
  • Kicking an Infantry Command Bot now kills the thing being spawned as opposed to having it hang around in a weird half-alive limbo state.
  • Late game Co-op Disconnects: It turns out all co-op games shut down after precisely 2 hours. Whoops! They no longer do that.
  • Crash bugs! We fixed some of the most frequent crash bugs.
  • UseKeyTrigger no longer says "Jump to hyperspace!" instead of whatever you configure it to say in the Level Editor.
  • Uranium/Insanium audio issues resolved: Previously music would cut out when too many things were happening at once. The game is now smarter about not playing things like footsteps halfway across the arena if 20 other sounds are already playing.

That's it for this little update!
Mar 4, 2021
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone - Doborog Games
Hey everyone! Here's a small hotfix following the update today.

We fixed the following urgent bugs:
  • Co-op Challenge Invites no longer have strangers dumped in them!
  • Beating chapter 5 on insane is an upcoming achievement that we surfaced too soon. Removed it from the list for now!
  • Some players experienced a crash on startup related to their language. The game now has more safeguards against data corruption in this area and falls back on English!

Let us know if you find any more bugs! <3

Cheers,
Erik
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone - JoshFTL
Hello Humans!

You should notice Clone Drone in the Danger Zone updating on your computer. This is completely normal and not preparation for us to download your brain into a Drone.
We Fixed some bugs!
Thank you for all your reports! You have really helped us make the game better. If you find more, let us know on Discord or via bugs@doborog.com.

This isn’t the full list because we have fixed a lot of things but the most important changes are:

  • Single Player
    Speech variety: We now play more than the first 8 variants. There will be more variety for things like getting a clone.
  • Last Bot Standing
    Laser no longer snaps up at the end of firing
  • Co-op
    Invisible enemies: This should no longer happen. Let us know if it still happens to you!
    Spidertron should now burn when falling in lava!
  • Lots of crash bugs.
The new social area will show you what we’re doing
On the main menu you can now see more detailed news about the game and all of the Tiktoks that we release!

In the top right we will keep you updated on new things happening in the game. That might be a new update, a competition or workshop level highlight!

In the bottom right is every place on the internet you can find us. Want a random tiktok? It’s there! A cool shirt with a clone face on? Check the bottom right! Need to contact us? The list of social media will let you do that however is easiest!

More info on rules, bans and warnings
The multiplayer Last Bot Standing mode now has official rules to help everyone understand the conduct we expect for a fair and fun multiplayer battle.

Read the full rules and FAQs here:
https://support.doborog.com/clone-drone/last-bot-standing

All the reports of hacking and misconduct have been really helpful so keep those coming!

On the other hand, if you get timed out or banned (which we hope you won’t), there will be a pop up telling you exactly why and for how long!

We’re going to announce a full release date soon so stay tuned. We’re waiting on the consoles to review the game and some final preparations before we can tell you when Chapter 5 will arrive. But don’t worry, we will be taking care of the game after it’s launched with bug fixes and community content!

Until later, merry robot smashing!
Josh, Community Manager

---------------------------------------

Small additional update!
We fixed a few more bugs in a little hotfix (0.19.2.6) today! :D
  • Co-op Challenge Invites no longer have strangers dumped in them!
  • Beating chapter 5 on insane is an upcoming achievement that we surfaced too soon. Removed it from the list for now!
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone - JoshFTL
Hello Humans!

We invited you all to create levels inspired by winter and Christmas. Some incredible community members took that challenge and built amazing things, each with their own style.

They are all really fun and creative which is why I think you should go to this link and download them ALL!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2369933278

Here are our picks for the winner of each category!

Winter Competition Winner
Christmas Platforms by Goldierus

It's got animated snow ducks and laser trees! It makes great use of level design to make the fight fun too.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2330194832

Funniest
Totally Ordinary Present Delivery by Gorakh

A talking robot tree wants your help to deliver the presents to the right houses. Don't get it wrong or Analysis Bot might crush you!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2358561800

Most Challenging
Defeat Krampus by Ceterai

A huge level with the most memorable boss fight at the end. Can you make it all the way through Krampus' Castle and find all the secrets?
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2360901605

Best Decorated
Christmas Canyon by eastwestmetabolism

A HUGE Christmas Tree with a secret and fun candy cane moving platforms to jump on to!
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2362841018

Congratulations to all the winners and everyone who sent us their levels!
Tell us which ones are your favourites and leave nice comments on their workshop pages.

Thank you for a wonderful start to 2021!

- Josh, Community Manager
Clone Drone in the Danger Zone - JoshFTL
Greetings Human,

We hope you’ve enjoyed your festive human holidays! Huge news from The Danger Zone:

We got a new shiny trailer for the game in which you can see new scenes from the upcoming chapter 5 and we can confirm: work on chapter 5 is going well and it should land in early 2021!



What? That’s not news-esque enough for you? Oh, ok. Then… While we have teased it a few times we can officially confirm:

Clone Drone in the Danger Zone will officially land on Nintendo Switch, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on that same day chapter 5 hits Steam! We even got the game running on consoles already here and can’t wait to show you more.



Are you excited to slash, maim, crush, stab, pierce, burn and send more robots flying in new modes and on new platforms? Because we sure are!

See you soon for more human brain harvesting awesome news and Clone Drone updates!


📞💙 Want to join the bot revolution and see awesome community content? Join our Discord!
https://discord.gg/wbARCdrNGg
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