History of Clone Hero
Clone Hero is ultimately inspired by games such as Guitar Hero and Rock Band. What follows is a brief history of the game, written by the creator of Clone Hero - Srylain, and a look at what is coming in the future.
GuitaRPG
GuitaRPG started development somewhere around mid-2012, when I (srylain) decided I wanted to make a game that I wanted to play. XNA was the first engine I used, and at the time the game looked more like DDR(Dance Dance Revolution) or Rock Revolution because of the top down perspective. It even had extremely basic online multiplayer because everything I was doing at the time I made have extremely basic online multiplayer (stuff like Pacman clones, Bomberman clones, Tetris clones).
Then came the first change.
GuitarGame
After a while I tried doing a 3D perspective, all in 2D mind you, and it sucked. Hard. So I then quit the project and picked it up a couple years later after I had moved on to using Unity since XNA was killed by Microsoft. At that point I decided I didn't want to do an RPG anymore because of all the work involved, and thus the game became known as GuitarGame.
It got far enough to the point that it was playable with a controller, but it had problems due to my complete lack of knowledge about how music and MIDI files worked (which to be fair, I still know little to nothing about how music works technically) so things you'd think were basic like sustains were just completely missing because I had no idea how to get the length of a sustain from a MIDI chart.
Clone Hero
So after another year and a half (around March 2017) I decided to pick it up again. And while people seemed really hesitant at first about a new clone entering the scene, I kept working on it because I just wanted to see myself make a somewhat complete project after the numerous things I left completely broken or unfinished.
So cut to nearly a year later (December 2017), here we are where Clone Hero has somehow picked up an extremely big fanbase (relative to the amount of people still playing with their plastic guitars) and I'm somehow still adding things to the game I never thought I'd be able to do (because of lack of knowledge).
- Srylain, December 8th 2017
Clone Hero Reborn? Strikeline
On April 28th 2019, the Clone Hero team announced their intentions to rebrand from Clone Hero to the name identity "StrikeLine." The official post can be read here. However, while initially the v1.0 of Clone Hero was envisioned as StrikeLine, the team decided to keep the original brand for the 1.0 release.
V1 marks the beginning of a new era in this community. This release will mark the end of standalone Clone Hero releases, so we can focus all our development time into our next game, StrikeLine. After the release, Clone Hero will go into LTS, and only hotfixes for critical bugs will be released.
- Clone Hero Development Team, September 15th 2022
Clone Hero Version 1.0
On November 29th, 2022, Srylain posted this message in the Announcements channel of the official Clone Hero Discord:
The time has come. Clone Hero is officially complete and will be entering Long Term Support from here on out, which means no more features will be added and only minor bug fixes from here on out. The first ever public build I made was v.00000001 with the idea that there was never any reason to think an actual full release would ever happen, but with the help of tons of people like the others working directly on the game or the artists and charters lending their support to the included songs and the crew running this Discord server to the creators who helped grow the game into what it is today it's finally in a state we can consider as "finished".