🔧 Devlog 25 - From prologue to climax (Patreon)

This week was hectic with work. It feels like I did nothing and yet I did everything.

Matt vs Diego

I've already finished most of the combat. I still need to adjust some skills and some scenes depending on your decisions. Which is going to be a ton of work but it means we're almost there.

Based on your feedback, I decided to make the outcome of this fight inevitable, but I'm not going to say what exactly happens. That's for when you play.

Will Matt win? Being the descendant of a legend?

Or was his exhaustion too much and he loses against Diego?

I can only say that Alex beta tested it and loved it. I think this part, this storytelling, is effectively on another level. But this method can only really be used in super important scenes like this or I won't be able to handle it xD

But yeah, excited for you guys to play and see the result of these 150+ hours just on this, with some surprises that I think none of you were expecting. But the hints have been scattered throughout the game. (Hehehe.)

A new beginning

Not only did I redo the beginning of the game, allowing you to ask questions about parts of it, but I also added a mini adventure with Matt before arriving at the nightclub (a prologue) to better set the tone of the game while also making some thing clearer for new players.

Who do you think this raspy voice belongs to?

I also edited the choice between female and male character as well, that way it looks a bit more fancy :P

And lastly, I feel its a very nice toutch, Trueclash now lets you decide on the skin tone of your character. A lighter or darker skin tone for now.

This is mostly used for the hands, so in fact, there are 4 hands in total because it changes if you are male or female as well.

"So we have 4 CGs to unlock instead of 1 now?"

No—no no no! I learned to program better and now I can make conditional images. What this means is that it's the same image but with different variations. In short, on the TV and in the gallery it only counts as 1 image, but it changes depending on whether the last save you played was as female/male or dark/light skin. So no need to worry about playing the game as the opposite gender to unlock it all.

"Since you added a new introduction, do I have to play from 0 again?"

No. Currently this part serves more as an introduction, a mini adventure/situation more than anything else. If it's going to have repercussions later on, I can make a mini menu where I let you choose the outcome of this mini adventure (but only for those who, in their save, haven't gone through it). But for now, no need to worry about that.

There's 3000 words in this content as well as 5 new CGs for you to unlock.

In the future, I plan to make more updates to older content. But in a measured way. A bit patch by patch.

The memory log

Well, while I was redoing this new beginning, I remembered that I could make the text a different color and allow the player to click on it and this would remind the player in short texts what that term or theme was about. I'll put some images here as examples, but note that everything is still very raw.

When I realized what I was doing, I said... This looks like the memory log xD. But after 2 days working on this, I said to myself "what am I doing..." I should be focused on writing and not on doing this. So I closed it and went to write and write, and only if I've reached the word limit will I come back to this.

It was actually fun to do. I had to learn how to draw vectors in Photoshop to make the boxes, programming them, how to add brightness and glass-looking effects. It was pretty satisfying once set. The images I sent you are no good though. They have misaligned or not centered elements, and even in terms of the main background where the tabs with the topics appear, still not good with it. As well as lacking more functionality, etc. Still a very raw app heheh.

I don't feel it will turn out exactly as I imagined—I'll eventually have to hire someone. But it would be super useful to already program and organize the information because there's a lot to do. And maybe it's better to start with something that's not optimal and improve it later than having nothing at all.

Commission

(https://trueclash-games.itch.io/trueclash-games/devlog/1287991/-trueclash-is-recruiting-sprite-artist)

After the last devlog and your comments, I've been thinking a lot about where I want to put TrueClash's money. Especially where it would be most productive and where it would bring more quality to the game itself.

I thought about whether to hire someone for the GUI or for the character sprites.

I decided it would be best to try the character sprites. Not only would it help me prepare for season 2, but I could also have more control over how they look. And who knows, maybe update some of the ones we have so everything is uniform.

I've already made the post on itch and on our social media. But if that's not enough, I'll expand to specific artist forums where I believe we'll get some negativity or even hate for being a project that uses AI. But if I don't take the risk, I'll never find anyone, right?

Off I go again,

Zak