Hello, Toons!

With 2026 now in the rear-view, we wanted to take some time to reflect on 2025, how we as a team are doing now, and let you know a bit more about the future of Toontown: Corporate Clash.

A Post-Q4 Reflection and Q1 at a Glance

Halloween was a time for the crew to rest, recuperate, and have a bit of fun after our rough patch in June. It was experimental, and a bit messy as we found our footing after our hiatus. Most of what was implemented was suggested as something to do for fun, and an opportunity to let crew learn more about how other departments work. Many of the textures in Halloween, both Manager and costume, were done by crew who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to learn how to texture. Several manager costume concepts and posters were designed by crew who had never done official art before. In exchange, crew members already in these positions had a bit more time to relax while the workload was shared.

Both Erfit and Class Action were also part of this post-hiatus burst. While intended to be small in scope, it allowed Game Design to experiment with our managers and instance fights. It allowed writers to explore the characters who, up to this point, haven’t seen much love in a long time. New animations, new sound effects, and new mechanics all blended together into what you have seen both in our Halloween update, and in our Class Action Partner Playtest. It was all very new, and very exciting.

Of course, there were also downsides to this. Regardless of the aspects meant to focus on fun, finishing these updates within the span of 3 months was still a lot to ask of the team. So, December was taken as a cool-off period, with production mostly coming to a halt as we looked back on these 2 milestones (and also enjoyed the holidays). We learned a lot about our current team's desires for game progression, a lot about what our community expects of us, and where exactly those two sides differ. So, we have decided to make this post to offer a bit more clarity into our plans going forward.

So, where does that leave our current updates?

To start off, we'll address the updates that have received the most coverage by crew: Class Action, GaG, and Hammerspace.

We had originally intended for the full release of Class Action to be much sooner, as we had the mode playable and "ready" to release. Our Partner Playtest was meant to serve as a teaser for the mode, however, we have received many notes about how the mode can be altered and improved, both from partners and our community. The mode will be going into further development to adjust the most noted negative aspects of the mode, notably the Skelecog round, Stenographer cheats, and CLO action round. While we initially wanted the mode to be a small bonus reward for people who maxed their Cog disguises, we agree that there are still quite a few areas that need more attention. The mode will release once we are more content with the end product.

Much like Class Action, we have also observed the mixed feedback regarding GaG. We have had many discussions in crew regarding this feedback, including things like the situation regarding Ubers, inflated HP/damage numbers, and the Pouch system. While we do not currently have the answers to how we intend to solve these more divisive aspects of the update, rest assured that the Clash team, both Game Design and non-GD alike, will be doing our best to make a game that has the best of both the old and new battle systems.

Hammerspace, while not quite ready, has overcome a significant hurdle. As we discussed in our previous blogpost, Hammerspace's issues have come from a variety of places between technical limitations, changing crew, and reshaping the update according to the current crew's ideas and vision. Since our last update, our technical team has taken the time to fully familiarize themselves with the code and finalize the plan for the inventory system design. The team has also steadily progressed on that design, and is looking ahead and getting more people involved in the remaining technical work for the update. Hammerspace may still take a while to release, but we hope to provide more news soon as our technical team progresses forward.

We don't have much more to say regarding these updates, as our last blogpost covered most of that ground. That said, there are many other updates we've talked about before, and it's time to give them a spotlight.

Mix N' Match and the Taskline Revamp

Many of you have been feverishly itching to know about the status of Mix N' Match, the status of the Taskline revamp, and the general direction we're going with updates after our recent team restructuring. While this was originally meant to be added to the GaG blogpost, it was omitted due to website limitations. We apologize that this information was unable to reach you sooner.

We're going to answer a lot of questions here, starting with Mix N' Match and the Taskline revamp. First, let's rewind for a bit. Mix N' Match and the Taskline revamp were announced coming off the heels of High Roller's development, when the team had much more steam and a much more optimistic view of how much work could be accomplished at once. As such, the team felt confident in announcing these projects, even when there wasn't much progress on either of them yet. As you can imagine, juggling Hammerspace code reworks, the Estate revamp, GaG, the Taskline revamp, and Mix N' Match all at once, on top of minor updates, was too much for the team. It swiftly led to burnout, and passion was fading fast. Thus, projects had to be delayed, downscoped, slowed down, or even shelved. Mix N' Match and the Taskline revamp slowed down in development significantly, and they eventually came to a complete halt to allow more focus on other projects. Needless to say, there's so much that we want to do for the game we love and the community we love, but we need to acknowledge our limits.

Circumstances have changed recently, so is there anything new to say for Mix N' Match and the Taskline revamp? Regarding the Taskline revamp, we are very sorry to deliver more disappointing news, but the Taskline revamp is being shelved for now. With the numerous upcoming combat changes, inventory changes, and more, we do not want to revise our story drastically only to need to do it again once other projects finish. While plot work and details have been decided for a future date, the revamp will likely not resume until we are confident that the story will not need to be rewritten over and over to accommodate new combat and character additions. This has also allowed for us to take the time to go over our internal lore documents, and work towards making the world more cohesive. We know many of you were looking forward to this project, and for that, we sincerely apologize. In the meantime, we have plans for new additions to our story that we hope you will enjoy as they release.

In tandem with this, we would like to announce that this is the last year that we will be doing the C.O.O. April Toons instance. As much as we love the C.O.O. and we know many fans do too, he has become an obligation to keep generating and hinting at future content, even if there was no actual content to share. This has resulted in a multitude of loose plot threads that, while they were planned to eventually become part of the story at one point, were either scrapped or never materialized (Dividend King and Crystalline being the most infamous examples). We plan for this year's C.O.O. to be the longest yet as a send off for him, and hope that you will enjoy the instance. From this point onward, we plan on releasing lore, including things involving Mr. Saggs, in other forms, in intervals that will not mandate an April due date.

For Mix N' Match, things are looking more positive, as we are looking to resume work in the coming months. At the moment, we don't have anything new to share for Mix N' Match, other than that it made some notable progress with the things we've talked about in the past before its work was paused. We are still eager as ever to bring new life to the Toons, and we look forward to showing more things from Mix N' Match in the future.

Looking Beyond Past Promises

Regarding the general direction of future updates, we're echoing what we stated in our previous blog posts - we're looking for a better balance between content that's good for game health, content that the community wants, and content that we, the Clash Crew, are motivated to work on. To maintain the well-being of our crew, we will also continue to avoid giving release dates to the public until we are sure enough that we can do what's needed by those dates. We decided as a team that Hammerspace will be taking more of a backseat (Gears and Gizmos was already a lower priority), and we're shifting more of our focus to smaller, passion-driven projects. Of course, this isn't to say that we haven't already shipped smaller updates with appreciated features for the past few years; we'll just be focusing more on them than previously. Starting back in May of last year and for a couple months after, we brainstormed more smaller, lower-stakes things we can accomplish to help upkeep the game's freshness and everyone's morale. We hope for things like the street tweaks we previewed to be more common.

For a long while, we were also very conservative about adding or making changes to permanent battle content in order to focus more on Hammerspace and other smaller projects. With how long this philosophy was held though, since battle content has a large presence in Corporate Clash, many in the community felt that Corporate Clash was getting increasingly stale. As you may have already noticed, we've slowly loosened up on this approach over time, leading up to our recent updates that made significant changes to a good chunk of battle content. Now, this trend won't keep rising until our every thought is nothing but battle content - Corporate Clash isn't just about the battles, after all. We are just more willing than before to add or change battle content before Hammerspace's release.

To that extent, while it would be fitting to rework facilities and department bosses alongside GaG, they won't be getting a full fledged rework, but they will still be affected by the base changes to the Cogs and given some necessary adjustments. This also includes the previously mentioned facility manager reworks. GaG already has a lot on its plate, and we'd like to do less piling up of features on big updates whenever it's feasible to. Facilities and department bosses will eventually get their own reworks to improve aspects other than the Cog battle rounds, but those probably won't be for a long while.

While we're here, we'll also take this time to get you up to speed on various things that were shown or talked about in the past:

Doodles: Not sure what we'll do with them yet, but we still want them to return eventually.

New Toon Movement and Camera Controls: These were shelved a while ago. They could still be a thing, but if so, we're not sure when.

Foil Stickers: These were shown more as a proof of concept than a feature that was actually intended to be implemented. We've discussed having new cosmetic loot, but foil stickers may not be what we go for.

HUD Revamp: Shelved a while ago. It can still happen, but it'll look different than the very early concept that was shown in the past. For reasons you can probably guess, some UI work will still be necessary in Hammerspace, MnM, GaG, and likely the Taskline revamp.

New Building Loading Animations: This feature was functional, but was also buggy to the point where it was shelved.

Firesetter's unmet Makeship rewards: The Firesetter accessories and comic are both still in our backlog. The comic will likely begin production once our artists have had plenty of time to rest after the release of Wingin' It. The accessories will resume work eventually, but we cannot guarantee when.

Conclusions

Simply put, the Corporate Clash team is not the same team as was here during 1.3. Many people have left, and many people have joined. While we appreciate our previous members and their ambition, simply put, we are not them, but are still beholden to their promises.

We intend to fulfill these promises, but they may take some time to be formed and shaped by the desires of our current talent. Things may take longer, or not quite look how previous crew wanted them to.

We appreciate your patience as we rebuild, and work to make the game the best it can be.