Cyber Clutch: Hot Import Nights

Company: Fusion Interactive (previously Team 6 Game Studio)
Software: Unreal 4
Platform: Steam, PS4, PS5, XBOX series S, XBOX One
Role: Level Designer/Game Designer
Released: 2024
Development Time: ~1 year

A multiplayer game blends high-speed racing with intense vehicle combat, set against a backdrop of vivid cyberpunk landscapes. The game focuses on skillful driving, strategic combat and vehicle customization. Prepare to outdrive, outgun, and outsmart your opponents in this adrenaline-pumping racing adventure.

Early Access Release

We received Cyber Clutch: Hot Import Nights (from here on HIN) as a fixer-upper project from another studio. Salvage all we can, fix any crucial broken parts, and ship it on the target platforms within the deadline.

My responsibilities at this time could be summarized with;

Salvage any tracks possible;
- Audit the made tracks to see what work is required to get them to a shippable state.
- Determine goals, setup a timeline and improvement pipeline for all existing tracks to ensure the track goals could be achieved before the deadline and onboard all level stakeholders.
- Clean up the tracks folder structure, outliners and divide the levels into our usual sublevel structure to enable efficient cooperation between the level stakeholders.
- Fix track design issues to ensure the intended racing experience emerged.
- Fix a whole range of different collision issues, racing spline & volumes alignment issues, lack of signposting and on-track gameplay actor bugs.
- Continuously playtest, iterate and communicate with the Game Design team and level stakeholders to ensure we were hitting our goals on-schedule.
Create new content in the form of tracks;
- Create “reverse track” versions of existing tracks to effectively double the content in a short amount of time.
- Make necessary track design adjustments to the reverse tracks to ensure they hit the intended racing experience.
- Communicate and cooperate with environment art to ensure the reverse tracks lived up to the intended visual fidelity without losing out on clarity.
- Concept, pitch and design one additional new track with a reverse version. (As of yet unreleased.)
Work with the Game Design team on improving vehicle combat;
- The vehicle combat is offensive and defensive abilities based. We redivided the abilities over all vehicles to ensure every vehicle is capable of offense, defense and counter play.
- Remade and adjusted certain abilities functionality to ensure all abilities are useful and valuable in some situation during the race.
- Rebalanced all ability stats through playtesting and applying feedback to ensure fairness.
- Increased ability satisfaction by adjusting ability VFX & SFX in cooperation with the VFX artist and Sound Designer.
- Fixed a boat-load of bugs.
Revamp and fix the tutorial;
- Redesign the tutorial to give the player more agency in trying out the racing mechanics without the active gameplay continuously being interrupted by tutorial messages and pop-ups.
- Fix numerous bugs and issues with the tutorial functionality & track.
- Playtest and iterate to ensure the player is taught all necessities during the tutorial.

Please check out the latest patch changes I worked on below!

Major Update 0.9.3 “The combat update”

Patch Notes 0.9.3.0
The patch notes have been reduced to only the features I have personally worked on. For the full patch notes, please visit the official steam page.

Combat Overhaul

Vehicle Armor

Energy and the Shield Ability has been replaced for Vehicle Armor to reduce active focus on defense, increase survivability, and allow players to focus more on offense and racing.
- Incoming Abilities first damage and deplete Armor before hitting the player’s health pool
- Drive over Armor Pickups to replenish some Armor
Ability Pickups

Ability Pickups give a semi-random Ability depending on the player’s race position. These abilities can help the player catch up or overtake, defend or attack.
- Drive over an Ability Pickup to receive an ability in the [Right Face Button] slot
- The Ability will remain in the slot until use. The slot needs to be empty before a new Ability can be picked up
- Depending on the player’s race position they have a higher chance of receiving certain abilities
Ability Targeting

Only Special Abilities can now be targeted and require a Lock-On to home to their target. Basic Abilities are now shot using dumb-fire only. This has introduced more skill expression and player agency in offense.
- Targeting is now only for projectile Special Abilities [Up Face Button]. When a projectile Special Ability is available and off cooldown and a target is within range, targeting will automatically activate
- A Lock-On is established when having an opponent targeted for 1 second. Projectile Special Abilities shot during a Lock-On will automatically home towards the target. Shooting before a Lock-On will dumb-fire the projectile
- Dumb-firing shoots projectiles forward from the player’s vehicle. The projectiles will follow the vertical curvature of the road, going up and down slopes. This requires players to aim for targets using their vehicle
- Basic Abilities [Left Face Button] are now dumb-fire only
Hit Boost

Hitting an opponent with Abilities now gives the owner of those Abilities a small speed boost, rewarding the player for the hit and giving the opportunity to catch up, overtake or stay ahead.

Speed Boosts

Speed Boosts now scale their intensity and duration depending on the player’s racing position, allowing players that are behind an opportunity to catch up. New speed boost sources have also been added.
- Speed Boosts now scale their intensity and duration depending on the player’s racing position
- For Example: In first place a player’s speed boost might be active 1 second where in last it might be active 2.5 seconds
- Ability Pickups have multiple Abilities in their pool that provide a speed boost to the player
Opponents Status Displays

Status Displays are now displayed above every opponent. Allowing players to make more informed combat decisions and providing hit feedback.
- The Status Display shows vital information like the opponents Health (green bar), Armor (blue bar), and whether the opponent has a shield active (bars become white)
- Received damage is indicated in the Health & Armor Bars with orange nodes
- The Status Displays are visible within a certain distance of a player and when receiving damage
Ability Balancing

General balancing changes have been applied to Abilities to improve competitiveness and the value of each Ability.
- Projectiles can now destroy Ability Barriers & Mines. Mines will still explode on destruction
- Basic Ability cooldowns have been lowered and damage has been increased across the board
- Special Abilities cooldowns have been increased and base damages have been slightly increased
- Barrier and Mine abilities lifetimes have been reduced
- Null Barrier & Null Rounds no longer reduce Energy, instead now do additional damage to Armor
- Flame Wake DOT now applies only once, stacking damage (until a cap) and resetting its duration for each instance of the Flame Wake hit. Dealing low damage when briefly driving through the Flame Wake but rapidly building damage when staying within
- Sonic Boom no longer instantly activates but now has a brief windup, giving an opportunity to players with a shield and a fast reaction time to block
Miscellaneous
- The tutorial has been updated to inform players about the most important new features
- The HUD speedometer changes in color and slightly scales up depending on the vehicle’s speed
- The HUD Health & Armor bars become white when shielded
- The HUD ability icons become gray when the player’s abilities have been disabled by the Stinger ability
- The hitmarker now indicates when the player hit a shield with their ability
- Ability icons indicate whether a projectile ability is targetable with a border
- AI opponents now generally use their abilities more effectively

For a more granular view of all combat features I was involved with, please open the Patch Notes above.

This update was intended to overhaul the combat. I was tasked to spear-head the overhaul. Together with the Creative Director we set up the following combat overhaul goals after considering community feedback and our own long-term goals:

Introduce skill expression in combat
Racing should serve combat, and combat should serve racing
Introduce comeback opportunities
No race should feel the same, introduce variables in combat
Make offense the focus, defense more passive
Increase combat feedback and combat information transfer to players

Responsibilities

My responsibilities during this patch creation can be summarized with;

(Re)designing features to support the established goals, receiving and integrating feedback, and onboarding all stakeholders onto the changes.
Refactor all combat actors to support these and future changes & iron out bugs (Tech was largely unavailable during this patch).
Implement any new combat features/changes in blueprints.
Rebalance all ability stats after the newest changes.
Update the tutorial to reflect the newest changes.
Test and iterate on all changes.
Coaching and integrating a new Level Designer into the HIN project.

Refactoring Combat Actors

Cleaned up the combat folder structure and removed all unused assets for more efficient work.
Refactored all ability blueprints with a new parent-child structure for easier and quicker new ability creation
Refactored the damage application call stack to remove implementation differences/faults and support planned changes
Refactored speed boost application to vehicles to support planned changes
Remade and changed a number of abilities to increase uniqueness, effectiveness or fairness

Abilities Parent-Child Blueprint Structure

Damage Application Call Stack

New/Changed Combat Features

Refactoring the automatic ability targeting system and implementing a lock-on time (think dog-fight locking on)
- Intended for special projectile abilities. When locked on they home in to the locked target. A lock-on time was implemented to allow for defensive counterplay by blocking the view or getting out of the targeting zone, with which racing serves combat.
Implementing projectile ability “dumbfiring” (think Mario Kart green shells)
- Intended to increase skill expression in combat, reducing the reliance of automatic targeting. Instead the player has to aim with their car, with which racing serves combat.
Implementing passive vehicle armor instead of an activatable shield (think second refillable health-bar)
- Intended to decrease the player’s focus on active defense to allow more focus on offense and racing. On-track armor pickups to refill the player’s armor are placed outside the optimal racing line so the player has to decide whether to pick up armor or take the optimal route.
Granting a speed boost to the instigator when their ability hits another vehicle
- Intended to reward a player for hitting another with an ability and providing opportunity to overtake or stay ahead, with which combat serves racing. This introduced a thrilling neck-on-neck dynamic between battling players.
Opponent Status Displays providing real time information on health, armor and received damage
- Intended to provide the player with combat feedback and information so they could make informed split-second decisions on how to approach a combat situation.

Opponent Status Display

Player HUD improvements

Communicated and brainstormed with the UI Artist to improve the UX of the player HUD with the goals to;

Improve peripheral readability of the HUD to reduce active attention the player has to give to it to get information.
Represent the different statuses of their vehicle through the HUD (ex. invulnerable/shielded, low health, abilities disabled)
Represent the newest changes in the hud (ex. the vehicle armor)

I further did the functionality implementation in widget blueprints.

Player HUD

Coaching the new Level Designer

During this time a new Level Designer joined our ranks! 😀 I had several responsibilities towards the new Level Designer during the patch development:

Help integrate the Level Designer into the HIN project
Help setup his sprint planning, timeline and pipeline for improving the existing tracks
Onboard him onto the different systems and processes we use for creating our tracks and the expectations there would be
Audit his Jira and ensure he was not running behind or any issues in the process were quickly solved
Ensure he was able to quickly get up to speed and help establish the necessary communication lines for him to do his job
Protect him from any unnecessary issues or expectations that might arise

Check out more of the game on the official website!

Official Website