Hi Legends,
1.4 Devlog #4: a new coat of paint.
First, the vote. Sunday is the last day to choose which two of the four new maps come first. See them here and vote on Discord. The two winners arrive in 1.4, the other two in 1.5. This one is less about numbers and more about how Clutch Legend looks, sounds and plays out on screen: new art across the game, maps you can hear, and two changes to the Live you'll notice in the first round you watch.
Every tournament has its own place
The tournament backgrounds were the part of the game I liked least. A handful of images repeated over and over, and many of them looked like the same hall with different lights.
So I replaced them with 88 new paintings, in the same style as the main menu: eight for every kind of event, from a small Open cup to a Major. They show the arena from outside, the way you see it when you arrive: a sports hall in a city square, a theatre, a stadium by the river, a few fans already at the doors. Smaller events get smaller, rougher venues, the big ones get the places you'd expect.
The game also checks where the event is held. If a tournament is in a city without a sea, you won't see a harbour behind the arena. Small thing, but it was the kind of detail that broke the picture for me.
You'll see them in the tournament history of the Hall of Fame, where every event you played keeps its own picture.
The maps, painted
The maps got the same treatment. Each one now has a painting that shows the place it's built around: the sphinx, the mossy bridge of Viaduct, the night construction site above the city on Summit. They were already in the map pool and in the veto. Now they're everywhere you look at your maps: your profile, your team's map knowledge and the map choice in The Week.
Every map sounds different
Five of the seven maps have a new sound, built from scratch. On Viaduct it rains, and every now and then thunder rolls in. Caldera has a village fountain and sparrows. Oasis has a desert city and distant explosions, sometimes two or three in a row. Reactor hums and crackles like something about to give up. Summit has a city around it and a helicopter that passes over every minute or so.
Nothing repeats in the same order: the sounds are picked and spaced at random, so two matches on the same map never sound exactly alike. If it's too much, the Ambient slider in the settings controls all of it. Sphinx and Sandstorm are next.
Under the roof
Some places on the maps are covered: corridors, tunnels, the passage under a building. Until now a player walking through them looked exactly like a player out in the open, which never felt right.
Now covered areas are part of the map, thirteen of them across six maps. When a player walks under a roof, their dot fades out smoothly and comes back when they step outside. Their name, health and the bomb stay fully readable, so you never lose track of who is where. It's only what you see: who can shoot whom doesn't change.
T sides that split
Terrorists used to commit to one plan for the whole round. Now, in about a third of T rounds, the team splits. Two players go and put pressure on the other site: they throw their utility and one of them tries to get in. If they manage to hold the site, the whole team swings there at full speed. If they don't, the rest goes ahead with the original plan.
Who goes is not random: riflers and lurkers first, the in-game leader last. It works for both teams, yours and your opponent's, and your coach's calls don't change.
On defence this means you can't read the round from the first contact anymore. When the pressure works, the attack wins almost four rounds out of five. When it fails, the Ts pay for it. It doesn't make one side stronger, it makes the round much harder to read.
What I'm painting next
The next screens getting the same treatment are the ones that open every season: the captain who welcomes you to a new team, the season briefing, the map pool and the sponsor offers. The map pool in particular is turning into a small reveal, with the season's maps showing up one at a time. It's still on the drawing board, so I'll show it when it's ready.
Next time
Once the vote closes I'll show you the two winning maps and the new seasonal map pool. If something looks or sounds off once 1.4 is out, tell me on Discord.
See you soon,
Federico