Hi all!

It's been a while since our last development update on the next major version of Corporate Clash. Apart from a certain High Roller, our focus this year has been on the 2.0 "Hammerspace" Update. You might have caught some of our sneak peeks posted on the #behind-the-scenes channel on our official Discord, and we've enjoyed seeing the speculation on what's coming next.

This blog post will cover what the Hammerspace Update will contain, and our roadmap for 2024.

Hammerspace

We've been saying that word for most of the year, but what is Hammerspace? 

Hammerspace is a term derived from general cartoon fanon describing the effect where cartoon characters can produce objects out of thin air. In the context of Corporate Clash, Hammerspace is a unified Toon inventory where everything a player owns is presented and accessible from a global interface. In a way, Hammerspace is the cartoon inventory.

Hammerspace makes game development quicker by re-organizing all item data, making it much easier for us to add new items and mechanics with less overhead required (such as having to implement unique interfaces for everything, such as the Kart Shop).

As a hypothetical, suppose we were interested in expanding or overhauling Fishing. To do this, we may want to add new fish or let people buy new fishing rods independent of their progression. The current Tell-Tale Carp sells only progression-based fishing rods, so it would take a lot of work to add new fishing rods that the player could purchase from the shop. Equipping different fishing rods comes down to a small box hidden in the Shtickerbook, which tells you nothing about how the fishing rods function. To revamp fishing, we would have to rewrite how fishing rods work, and then have to rewrite the fishing rod shop, and create a new UI for players to see how each fishing rod functions, and all of this isn't even related to adding new fish at all. This is a lot of work for a single expansion.

But with Hammerspace? Every item is now unified under the same internal system, making iteration and expansion much more feasible for our development team.

We can now add new fishing rods or new kinds of fishing rod stats, like "cast time" or "crit chance", any time we'd like. While we're using fishing rods as an example in this case, this can be applied to a wide variety of items with Hammerspace's infrastructure in place. Hammerspace provides a unified interface for equipping various item types, or creating simple, general shops that sell any kind of item.

We are also developing new internal tooling to allow us to add new items or change item properties with very little, or in some cases, no developer involvement. This will allow the Game Design and Creative Teams to make changes to aspects of the game without needing to pair up with a Technical Team member, speeding up the time it takes for new ideas and tweaks show up in game.

Hammerspace is our secret weapon for expanding the horizons of future updates. Once all of the necessary backend work has been complete, we will have a far more robust and flexible infrastructure in place to develop future content updates.

For the more technical-savvy out there, here's some code comparisons from old TTO source to post-Hammerspace refactors, to better show off how it benefits developers.

Mix-and-Match

In our last blog post on Mix-and-Match, we talked a lot about how we plan to overhaul Toon customizability. It's super exciting stuff, but it's also an extremely ambitious project for us to pull off. Even ignoring the implementation and existence of wide Toon variability, there are a number of things that would need to be revamped to support it: the Make-a-Toon, applying the new Toon animation infrastructure for the entire game, fine-tuning the camera and controls to perfection, etc.

As such, we're prioritizing getting the rest of 2.0 done first before we commit to the development of the core Mix-and-Match system. To help avoid extremely long development cycles, such as the one that plagued the 1.3 update, we plan to release major updates in more manageable chunks. Long-term, this strategy means that we'll be able to develop the same amount of content sooner.

On the plus side, certain elements of Mix-and-Match are already done and slated for 2.0, like being able to wear multiple accessories at the same time. In 2.0, Toons will be able to wear up to three Hats alongside a new, exclusive Neck slot for scarves and the like. If we ever want to add a new accessory slot in the future, such as hip accessories, the Hammerspace infrastructure would allow us to do so very quickly in code.

The Mix-and-Match project plans also include major optimizations for Toon loading as well. Those haven't been delayed either – we've already sped up Toon loading by 5x by taking advantage of new features in Panda3D, our game engine. In addition, we've fixed a long-standing issue where Toons and Cogs were still rendering while off-screen, meaning that Toon-dense areas will enjoy significantly higher performance in general. This especially impacts NPC-heavy areas such as Toontown Central, reducing their load times by a nice margin.

We've got further optimizations in mind as well, so stay TOONed!

Estates

Earlier this year, we shared some 2.0 behind-the-scenes content in our public Discord server. In particular, we've been showing off overhauled... Estates?

Estates are the only place in Corporate Clash where Toons can hide away from the hustle and bustle of the town, in a private space entirely of their own. Many of our players love to use it for private gatherings, or just to zen out and enjoy being alone in their own space. When reviewing the changes and requirements necessary for Hammerspace, we discovered that remaking Estates from scratch would require a similar workload to updating the old Estates system to be functional with Hammerspace. Estates have also been quite a neglected part of Toontown, so with the 2.0 update, we've decided to revamp the Estates system!

We will launch the overhauled Estate system with some new furniture and fresh interior/exterior models for the 2.0 update, with the ability for Toons to purchase more spaces and connect them together (why stop at adding a second floor to your house when you can have a second house in your house!), and a brand new furniture placement editor. It may sound simple, but the revamped Estates infrastructure has massive potential for future expansions. For example, we are evaluating introducing progression elements for your Estates and other kinds of ecological expansions that'll make you want to keep coming home and maintaining your domain. These are things that we just would not have had the time commitment to pull off before Hammerspace.

Another aspect of Estates that has not been expanded on since its release is the social aspect. In Toontown Online, there was no way to open up your Estate to other Toons that were not your friends. It was possible to host parties, but they were time-limited and did not allow for as much customization as your house did. We are currently designing new mechanisms to make Estates less isolated, such as the ability to link multiple Toons' Estates together via special doors, as well as a public Estates "phonebook" where Toons can make their Estate visitable by anybody in Toontown, even when they're not logged in. We want to let players build organic communities through Estates, just like in the real world.

While new Estates are only currently for the Toons of the World, there isn't much stopping them from being for entire Clubs in the future. The Cattlelog will be replaced with something much larger and entirely different from the system that currently exists. What could it all mean? You'll have to stay TOONed to find out more!

Game HUD

An aspect of the Hammerspace update that we haven't shown off until now is the HUD revamp. We are currently in the process of redesigning the layout and functionality of the game's core HUD (Heads Up Display), a large project which encompasses all of the visual interface that players use on a daily basis throughout the game. In particular, we're aiming to reduce the amount of user interface that pulls the player out of the experience by blocking large portions of the screen (as well as their movement), creating a more seamless gameplay experience overall.

As seen below, you can now flip through all of the pages in your Shtickerbook at any time while freely moving around the game world!

In addition, we've created a new backend system that allows us an extreme amount of control over the types of interfaces we can show on screen at any given time. For example, if you are in a group with 3 other Toons, we can now show 3 additional panels for your group members underneath your own Toon panel in the top left with relative ease. A variety of existing UI elements have been converted to use this new system, such as Toon Tips, as well as some new features, such as being able to see other Toon's pie counts during the V.P. fight.

This is quite a large project, and we're going to need your feedback to get it right! If you have any thoughts or criticisms on what we've talked about regarding the HUD revamp, please be sure to leave your thoughts in our official Discord or on our social media!

The Status of Events

We know many of you were disappointed that Count Erclaim did not return to Halloween this year. We've explained it in detail in our DreamHack presentation (you can watch the recap here), but we will repeat what we've said in the presentation here:

In previous years, much of Corporate Clash's development culture has been event-centric in nature. This includes many recurring releases for April Toons, Halloween, and Toonsmas, which featured some of our most iconic characters and gameplay. However, to make the events a memorable experience, we need to put the whole team to work on those events. For every event revamp we launch, it takes 3 months of work from the entire team to bring new features from mere concepts to reality; virtually all work on permanent content stops when we work on events. Trading development of the permanent game (content that everybody can enjoy at their pace) for development of events (available to players for 4 to 6 weeks out of 52 weeks in a year) is not sustainable for our team, nor is it in the best interest of the community. 

Events, however, still have their place in development: It lets us experiment with brand new mechanics (like the Pips system) and make technological innovations (such as the cutscenes in Count Erfit) without the risk of requiring us to consider whole-game balance. If an event is a hit, we can evolve the novel concepts into permanent gameplay. If it's not, we can simply remove it without needing to consider other aspects of the game that may need adjusting.

In order to balance the two conflicting priorities, we have decided to create a new development policy: We will only work on revamping 0 - 1 events each year. This means older events will re-run without new features, and if certain features require a lot of team attention to bring them up to the current gameplay standards, they will likely be removed outright for the year (such as Count Erclaim). We will only commit to revamping at most 1 event per year; this also means the team may choose to not work on events at all for the year.

For 2024, we will not be working on any event revamps. We will however make balancing tweaks to High Roller (our permanent April Toons' Manager Boss fight) and Face the Family. This will also mean Count Erclaim will not return in 2024's Halloween event either, but this is not forever goodbye to our beloved Count. We know many of you look forward to these Manager fights, so we're also thinking about solutions that make development time for these fights more worthwhile (e.g. locking event Manager bosses behind side ToonTasks outside of their respective holidays). Let us know what you think in our official Discord or on social media!

The Road Ahead

We're expecting 2024 to be the year of the Hammerspace. While we don't know exactly when it will launch yet, we have a few other things we can confirm:

• We're looking to revamp a mainline Cog Department in the first half of 2024. We can't quite tell you which department it is yet, but more will be revealed soon! (Note that the update will only revamp the visuals of the mainline Cogs, meaning that there will be no specialists nor new HQ / HQ expansion.)
• We're also working on revamping every Cog animation in the game. This is quite a large task, but should provide a nice glow-up to Cog visuals, as well as make these animations easier to work with in the future. This refresh should also be released sometime in 2024.
• We will release a small April Toons' Update in April 2024, with minor tweaks to High Roller and Face the Family.
• Our Writing Team is currently constructing a brand new Taskline! We'll also be looking to revisit how ToonTasks are presented to make them more engaging and less fetch-y. This isn't planned for 2.0, but will be brought in down the line!
• In our development update at the beginning of this year, we previously showed off a very work-in-progress image regarding toon equipment. We still want to tackle this project, but it is currently being put on the backburner while we continue work on the more core elements of Hammerspace so that those may release first.

Our focus with this update is to rewrite and redevelop large portions of the game's backend code, so that future updates have a solid foundation to sit on. While we would absolutely love to continue to work on exciting new Manager bosses and progression expansions such as Kudos, we first need to take these steps to ensure that the game is as expandable as possible for the future. We know it's not quite as exciting as the Hires and Heroes update when it comes to player-facing features, but the impact Hammerspace will have on future development cannot be understated. If you've been around a long time, you definitely remember 1.1 - and how 1.1 was mostly a "backend" update that allowed us to do the grand things that arrived in the game with 1.2 and 1.3. This update is extremely important for us and will allow us to create new content we never would have been able to previously, even if we have to get through this fundamental work first. The Hammerspace update is a stepping stone to the future of Clash - We think it'll be worth the wait!

Conclusion

We hope this blog post has given you more context on what Hammerspace is, why we're working on it, and how it impacts the game's evolution. It may not be as shiny as having an entire new Cog HQ or 16 new Managers, but rest assured that this is only the beginning. With Hammerspace as our base, we'll be able to create new content with more flexibility, and at a faster pace than before.

Catch you all in 2024!