Howdy, Toons! Writing Leadership here, bringing you a bit of an unorthodox post today: we're here to talk a bit about the newly formed Writing Team! Why have we decided to form our own team? What does the future of Corporate Clash's writing look like? We'll touch on all that and more, including a chance for you to ask us your burning questions.

What Goes On

With an MMORPG comes plenty of characters, quests, cutscenes, external media, and more. Someone's gotta be responsible for it all, and that's where we come in! The vast majority of what you see that is story or character related, whether it's on the website, in game, or on our socials, often starts with us writers. We are everywhere, and yet... we are nowhere! Writing isn't something that the Crew often speaks on, as in the past a lot of topics such as the lore and details of characters have been kept under wraps for future use. Transparency is definitely not our strong suit, which brings us to part of why we're here today! That's something we'd like to fix.

Many things have changed in Corporate Clash's five years of existence, so we'll set the stage with a fun fact!

A Brief History

Imagine, if you will, a much younger Corporate Clash Crew Discord server, with its newly-formed Game Design Team. Within is a single lore-related channel called #lore-writing. On a much smaller Crew, this channel was used by a select few responsible for all writing for the game, characters, comics, the future of the story, everything. And that is the way things were for quite a few years! That is, until 1.3 development began. Leadership on the Crew shifted, and 16 manager bosses were pitched for the update to compliment the social features planned–all new characters now in need of dialogue, cutscenes, and a long teaser comic. It was clear that the team's writing needs were growing rapidly, and more organization was needed to keep up with development. Thus, writing as its own role officially began as Lore Writing on the Game Design Team.

Being a brand new subdepartment of Game Design with newly organized staff was rough, but also fun! We were all in it for whatever the future had in store–all the trying, failing, learning, and trying again–because we had already grown so attached to the concepts of all the new characters to be introduced in Hires & Heroes. We wanted to do them justice, so that the community could fall in love with them like we had! Lore Writing at the time consisted of about 8 folks, and was very tightly knit as a result. Together, we wrote everything you see of all the new managers' characters; from their in game appearances to the 1.3 series of ARGs!

Fast-forwarding another year to July of 2023, the needs of writing continue to expand as Clash's reach increases. There's greater need for its own management and specialization amongst its members, leading us to make the exciting decision to split away from Game Design and form our own team!

Where We're At

When it came to creating the dialogue, cutscenes, comics, and everything writing-related needed for the Hires & Heroes update, we came to realize something important that shapes how the Writing Team views its work in the present. Due to how the Crew has progressed and built upon itself, iterating both the game and its internal processes, we realized that we'd hit a wall sooner or later. It was extremely hard to tell what exactly was or was not canon from the past due to heavily scattered information, as well as a lack of concrete, defined sources of canon content. This issue has manifested over the years into something quite enigmatic and formless, leading to contradictions upon contradictions in attempts to self correct, and a downward spiral of a writing rabbit hole! That is to say, the taskline is not very interesting or engaging by itself. The natural progression of that being that every piece of Clash's properly developed narrative is offloaded to encounters added in post, or external mediums outside of the game. And on top of THAT, it's all built on a foundation of events that are no longer available, such as Operation: Break the Law.

Combined, all of these problems lead to a narrative that is disjoint at best (to those who do understand it) and extremely vague at worst (to all Toons hopping aboard post-Break the Law). It's a dysfunctional state to be in, sure, but we on the Writing Team have been cooking up some (very) long-term fixes for all that ails our beloved game's narrative!

Where We're Headed

To preface with full transparency, the Writing Team (in conjunction with the Game Design Team) is currently in the brainstorming phase of producing an entirely new taskline, the goal of which to completely overhaul how tasking will feel to play in game. This is absolutely not something that we expect to release this year, next year, or whenever 2.0 makes its arrival. Essentially, the main campaign is returning to preproduction for a full redo of the game's story experience. And yes, we want it to feature all the characters that you know and have come to love (including some that are no longer around)! We have a long road ahead of us, so let's get into some of the things we currently have planned to aid in narrative presentation!

First on the agenda, we'd like to state for the record some concrete sources of canon information as this was not something defined previously. This is an important step in containing the narrative so that all folks wishing to know more know where to look!

These sources are limited to the game, the website (corporateclash.net), and cogs.ink.

Sources that are not considered canon consist of the following: social media, social media comics, podcasts, blogposts, and the Corporate Clash public Discord server.

That sounds like we're cutting out quite a lot of content, given the supremacy of our socials as narrative delivery vehicles in the past! However, as we've experimented with mediums such as podcasts, we've found that it does greatly contribute to that "scattered" feeling of all the little details. Put simply, they're not widely accessible as a delivery method, nor are they an engaging way to tell a story! We want to make it as easy and immersive as possible for fans of our story to catch right up. Additionally, we'd like to emphasize that not all of that media is lost as we address the next elephant in the room: the website.

The comics tab on the website, in our eyes, holds so much potential for storytelling! In the coming times, you will start to see some changes to it, rolled out over time. Among these changes, the addition of all of our social media comics to the comics tab so that they will be a part of the website (and thus, officially canon as stated above). There are also long term goals to expand on the characters and the world in ways not yet seen before utilizing this space on the website, though said methods are all still in the very early concepting stage.

That leaves us with that big end goal mentioned at the start of this section: the main campaign. Since a full overhaul of the tasking experience would entail a great number of changes to the existing narrative, and with our primary storytelling methods shifting from external sources to internal sources, there is the concern of a handful of older comics (plus The Last Stand) essentially falling out of canon. Fear not though, as these pieces of our past are not leaving for good. They are all important components of Corporate Clash's history, any that do not fit within a modernized narrative will earn a place on a Legacy Lore archival page.

Any Questions?

That was quite a lot of information all at once–though long overdue, we think! That all being said, we on the Writing Team are happy to give you our formal hello! We've got a few final fun goodies to leave you with before we wrap up here.

We'd like to leave you with an opportunity to ask us any questions you may have! As we stated at the very beginning, transparency has not been our strong suit in the past through our evolution into a proper team on the Crew. We'd like to make it up to you! 

You can use this form HERE to submit your questions! As a disclaimer, due to the reimagining of the taskline happening behind the scenes, a lot of minor details are subject to change (even as we try to retain the spirit of our characters and major events of the past), so we may not have a clear answer for any extremely specific questions just yet.

This form will be available from today until November 1st. After this period, the form will close, we will answer your questions, and update you here! As always, we look forward to hearing from you. Toodles!