Clearance Defence

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• Announcements·18 Jul 2026Official

  Devlog #7: Fighting Fire with Fire

  Fighting Fire with Fire It has been a busy few weeks since Devlog #6, so this one is a proper catch-up. Night 4 has stopped being the end of the road, the whole game has learned to play on a controller, and the difficulty finally climbs the way I always wanted it to. All of it is live in the Steam Playtest right now at v0.85.0. One thing up front, and I mean it: the headline stuff here is brand new and I have not had nearly enough eyes on it. So this is a call for balance help as much as a devlog. If you play Night 5, or you turn a wall into a gate, I would genuinely love to know how it felt. More on that at the bottom. Night 5: Fighting Fire with Fire For the longest time Night 4 was the finale. You would see off the Foreman Pudding, get your Thanks for Playing, and that was your run. Not any more. Night 5 is in, and it does what the title says: it fights fire with fire. The headline is the Bombardier. Night 5 is the first night that lets you build it, and it earns its keep the moment the crowds get thick. Where your single-target towers pick gnomes off one at a time, the Bombardier lobs area fire into the middle of a pack and softens the whole lot at once. It stays out of the build wheel until the third wave, so by the time the first proper press arrives you have just been handed the tool that answers it. Fair play, it teaches itself. And the night ends on a new boss: the Pyro Gnome. He is a fire-breather and he is not shy about it, rolling in on the last wave with a good deal more health than the Foreman before him. You will want your line sorted and your Bombardier well fed before he shows his face. Night 5 is fresh out the door and, being honest, barely tested. I will be watching how it plays and tuning the squeeze over the coming days, and your reports will steer that directly. Walls that turn into gates This is the one I am most pleased with. A wall can now take a single upgrade that turns it into a gate you open and close on the fly. It is the first piece of...
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• Announcements·27 Jun 2026Official

  Closing time, and the doors are open to everyone

  The Clearance Defence Playtest is open to everyone this weekend. No waitlist, no waiting to be let in. If you fancy holding a supermarket against a tide of garden gnomes after dark, you can walk straight in. Here's the situation. It's closing time, the lights are down, and the Summer stock wants the clearance aisle. You've got four full nights: build your maze of make-do towers out of whatever's on the shelves, keep the ammo moving from your forward bases up to the front line, and walk your civilians out to the safe zone before the gnomes get to them. Hold all four and Endless mode opens up, for when you want to find out exactly how long you can keep the place standing. A good weekend to walk in I've had my head down the last few days getting it into shape, and it's the best it has been. The towers have proper sound to them now, the engineers throw sparks while they work, and the place has a bit more life and noise to it than it did. There's a send-off waiting at the end of the campaign from someone who is not at all pleased to see you, and the options screen has had a tidy so the bits that should work, do. Tell me where it hurts That's the whole point of a weekend like this, so I've made it easy to share feedback. There's a short survey at the end of the campaign: two minutes, tell me what landed and what didn't. And the report-a-bug button sits in the menu the whole time. Write a line, hit send, and it comes straight to me with the details attached. No sign-in, no faff. Have a go, let me know what you think over on the Discord, and if you fancy more, give it a wishlist so you don't miss launch. Diolch, and good luck holding the line. Wishlist Clearance Defence on Steam Join our Discord
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• Announcements·16 Jun 2026Official

  Devlog #6 — Morale, Fire and a Fourth Night

  A fourth night The campaign has grown by a night. Night 4 plays start to finish now — dialogue and voice acting in, its beats playing through properly. We kept its roster deliberately tight: one fresh foe, so we can tune how it plays against everything you've built up by the time you reach it, rather than balancing five things badly at once. The boss it ends on no longer marches in alone. It travels with an escort — a cluster of hangers-on whose health is pooled into shared bands that pulse for as long as the boss is still standing. It's meant to be a proper "deal with the big one" puzzle rather than another health bar to chew through. Fire that spreads New troublemakers have joined the ranks: fire gnomes that lob incendiaries — and the fires they start now spread, creeping across the floor mid-burn and carrying their flames with them rather than staying put in one spot. They're canny about it, too, holding their fire when there's already plenty burning. A floor hazard that genuinely moves changes how you think about where you stand your line. Morale Your units now have feelings, and those feelings matter. Morale is two-sided: units in good spirits work that bit sharper, while rattled, worn-down units start to slip. Keep civilians safe and hold your shelves to lift it; lose shelves or let gnomes reach the HQ and it drains. If it bottoms out, Commander Eggustus gives you a window to claw things back before the operation folds. The meter is built to read at a glance — a band-coloured bar, a clear warning, and an unmistakable alarm when it's about to give out. The Laser Tower A new tower joins the line: the Laser Tower, a beam weapon rather than a projectile one. Its emitter rotates to track its target and fires straight from the lens. A continuous beam plays very differently from a stream of darts — we're still finding out exactly how. Endless mode, and a store that builds itself Endless mode is a survival run on its own terms — no fixed run of nights, just gnomes who...
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• Announcements·18 May 2026Official

  Three Nights Down — v0.60 closes the loop on Playtest

  A run from start to finish v0.60.0 closes the loop. You can play the demo through to the end now — three nights, all the way through — and the game has somewhere to land you when you win. When the final wave of Night 3 breaks, a Thanks for Playing scene plays. It's quiet, it matches the main-menu styling, and it has a Discord link on it because the most useful thing a finished player can do is tell us what they thought. Build FOB is now the first objective on every night, not just Night 1. The wave countdown sits and waits while you place it, and the rest of your build palette unlocks the moment your engineers have somewhere to come home to. We also added cross-night carry. Your workers, your unassigned civilians, your sealed stock — they all survive into the next night now. The morning panel tells you whether anyone didn't make it back to shelter overnight (2–10% attrition, rolled on the night seed so a save-reload can't reroll a bad outcome). Night 3 Rebalance The first pass of Night 3 was, frankly, easier than Night 2. The wave counts hadn't been touched since the prototype, and the boss — Foreman Pudding — was holding 22,000 HP and was simply not threatening at that price. In v0.60.0 every Night 3 wave is now meaningfully harder than its Night 2 counterpart. Fire gnomes appear throughout the night. Bomb counts climb. Burn duration ramps. And Foreman Pudding is now 40,000 HP and means it. Five difficulty tiers The big v0.56 change was difficulty. Up until then the dropdown said "Normal". After v0.56, it says: Normal — the existing experience. Hard — engineers carry construction material physically. A wall doesn't go up because you placed it; it goes up because someone walked the brick from the FOB to the build site. Restless Dead — bodies decay over 90 seconds. While they're on the floor, suspicion rises in the morning truce and morale takes a hit if cleanup is too slow. Survivor — all of the above, no mid-campaign breathers, and the unlock target is Night 3 on a...
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• Announcements·4 May 2026Official

  Devlog #4: A Handle on the Lever — v0.45.0

  Towers can run dry now. Every other change in v0.45.0 is a tool we've handed you for dealing with it. The headline change: towers run out of ammunition. Every shot decrements the magazine, and a tower stops firing when it's empty. The first time your projectile tower goes quiet halfway through a wave is the moment everything else in this update starts to make sense. What you've got to deal with it: • Send ammunition straight from the Safe Zone to a specific tower • Push supplies to a forward operating base to stage a buffer near the line • Request Resupply from any tower's context panel — three clicks, mid-wave • A new low-magazine indicator above each tower (amber under half, red and pulsing at zero) so you can read the situation across the store • Per-type storage budget at the Safe Zone — hoard one ammo type by spending capacity from another, the trade-off is yours • A rebuilt Safe Zone management panel pulling all of the above into one unified UI The whole logistics layer is in early testing and we'd love your feedback — we're looking for the balance point between meaningful resource management and fun, fluid gameplay. Read the full devlog: https://flatfrog.games/blog/2026-05-04-handle-on-the-lever Discord (fastest way to reach us): https://discord.gg/keCtUUk5MM v0.45.0 is live now on the Steam playtest app.
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