NEWS

News & Dev | April 9, 2023 (10:45 PM EST)

Setting The Stage

Image of CNC characters

Happy Easter for those who celebrate, and welcome back, this time for the third edition of the special edition weekly Clown Clear blog trilogy (aka a poor attempt at a marketing strategy). If you haven’t read the previous two about combat and game modes, you can do so at these links: In-Tents Combat | Game Modes Galore.

Today’s blog is all about level design, maps, and things otherwise related to the game’s campaigns.

The Game’s Setting

Clown Clear takes place shortly after the start of the Corydon Morbus outbreak, featuring multiple different states as the characters travel across the overtaken remains of the United States.

Taking place near Halloween in the Autumn season, the world exhibits a creepily festive environment and a primarily warm color palette.

Design Philosophy

Keeping this in mind, I’ve developed some general rules for myself to ensure the player is immersed when playing through the game’s maps. I won’t get too in detail about this for now, but here’s a few bullet points:

  • Game Time: A lot of the maps will take place during the early morning, or late at night, giving the game a creepy essence.
  • Lighting: Lighting is very useful in making sure the player knows where they’re going, especially in the darker levels. (flickering street lights, etc.)
  • Diversity: This is a pretty obvious one, but I’ve been trying to feature a wide variety of different locations and campaign events.
  • Boundaries: The game is pretty linear, so having an exposed path somewhere leading to the empty void isn’t very adequite, and neither is having invisible barriers everywhere. Therefore using things such as crashed vehicles, fences, walls, etc. help to keep their presence justified and lore friendly.
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    Panic Events

    Panic Events are different (mostly static) events that alert large hordes by themselves, these are typically used in finale levels and in varying areas of the campaigns. I haven’t decided whether or not I plan on having some of this be randomly chosen (like a panic event having 3 different areas it could activate), but it’s something I’ve been contemplating.

    AI Director

    Now, if you’ve played games with similar campaign modes such as “Left 4 Dead” or “Back 4 Blood” you’re probably not unfamiliar with the term, “The Director”.

    Clown Clear will feature a similar system since it’s really good at making sure each playthrough is different, although I might end up calling it something fancy like “The Ringmaster” because it’s thematic to the whole clown thing.

    There’s probably enough content there to dedicate it it’s own blog post, but in short I’m aiming for it to be very reminiscent to the above: featuring randomly chosen loot reserves, as well as dictating the spawns of bosses and common clowns, taking into account how well the player’s currently doing.

    Progress Update

    Currently the maps are in very barebone states, but I do have most of the concepts fleshed out. Currently I’m focusing more on the actual gameplay mechanics before focusing all of my attention on the level building.

    I might do a small-ish public playtest at some point with a single campaign, just so I can get more diverse feedback, but I’m not sure when I’ll go through with it. When I do though, you can be the first to know by following my Twitter, or joining the Discord.

    Conclusion

    I ended up spending more time with my family than expected, and had to rush through re-reading this, so there may be a few grammatical errors, regardless, I hope it was enjoyable.

    I’m also planning to reveal some more information on the game’s characters soon, so keep a look out for that.