🔧 Dev Log 3 – Reflections, Rewrites, and Rest

🔹 TL;DR – This Week’s Highlights

• 💭 Got hit with pre-burnout signs — took 3 days off, reorganized my workflow, and rewrote a lot of content. Much happier with the result now!

• ✍️ v0.2 has 15k words written so far, and we’re just getting into the halfway point of beerpong.

• 🧩 That single scene already includes 96 light variations, based on 13 decision points. Your choices matter, even in small ways.

• 🔄 Removed the “can’t save” rule from Diego’s scene to make it fairer.

• 🖼️ Polished older CGs (like the main nightclub), and improved Diego’s sprite.

• 🎵 Added new music for funny scenes.

• ⚒️ Still working on the beerpong event, match ending, and aftermatch interactions.

• 📅 Next content patch (v0.2) is still on track. aiming for release in about 3 weeks as scheduled!

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Hey everyone! Zak here 👋

This week’s dev log is going to be a little different and also public, because I felt like this was something worth sharing with the wider community.
It’s a bit more personal, a bit more reflective.

That said, all future dev logs will remain exclusive to Patreon supporters, as a thank-you for those helping support the project.

Instead of just updates as usual, I want to share a bit of what’s been going on behind the scenes not just with Trueclash, but with me.

I debated whether or not I should write something this personal, but maybe it’ll give you some insight into the creative process, how I work, and… maybe serve as a cautionary tale for fellow creatives.

✍️ How I Usually Work

I have to admit it. I’m a bit obsessed with the creative process. (a bit cough cough)
I genuinely love almost everything about it. Writing, designing characters, imagining scenes, building systems, improving the visuals, finding fitting music, layering choices...

It’s stimulating, fulfilling, and exciting.
And hearing your feedback? That’s fuel. Seeing someone enjoy what I’ve created makes me want to keep pushing and not let anyone down.
That pressure is part of what keeps me going, in a good way… most of the time heheh.

⚠️ And That’s Why Sometimes I Go Too Far

I love it so much that I sometimes go too deep.
I tweak character expressions endlessly, rewrite old scenes, obsess over micro-decisions, and spend hours imagining how players might feel at each point and the different decisions they might want to make.
And since I want everything to matter, I often go all in on details that most players will only notice subconsciously.

💢 Pre-Burnout

I work in this field, so I know the symptoms.
Last week, I overdid it. On Sunday, I started feeling them: stress, eye twitching, irritability, emotional exhaustion and the lack of will to do anything that requires your brain (worse part)… but that’s what we call pre-burnout signs or to simply put, mental exhaustion.

So I did the right thing. I stopped for three days to do “restorative activities”.
Even “good stress” is still stress, and I needed to breathe.

After that break, I reviewed what I had written… and I hated it. (typical when you write already when your creativity has been all spent up 😅)
So I started rewriting large portions of v0.2 and honestly, I’m way happier with it now.
Some scenes even made me laugh out loud while writing them. A good sign as it meant I was really enjoying the process again ^^.

✒️ What’s Currently Written (v0.2 Progress)

I’m mainly still working and refining the beerpong match related content.

Right now, patch v0.2 sits at around 15,000 words, and I’ve just reached the part where the "possible" beerpong match where you’ll play alongside Matt is just about to start for real.

On paper, that should equal 1 to 2 hours of content but with the amount of branching variations, actual gameplay time will vary a lot.

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🧩 Beerpong Scene Structure

It’s hard to explain this and it goes technical. Feel free to skip this part but I will do my best to make it clear. Here goes:

There are currently:

• 3 major variations (major paths),

• And multiple minor variations that adapt character dialogue, behavior, and reactions based on your past choices.

Here’s one real example from a recent branch I finished:

• Scene variations go: 2 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 2
  That’s 5 points of divergence in one path, with 6–8 lines each on average per each variation present on each point. (some extend way beyond that)

If my math is right, that means there are 96 unique ways to experience that branch.
You obviously won’t need to replay 96 times to see everything but it’s those little differences that (I hope) make your choices feel meaningful as well as what it might unlock after.

I’m not sure I explained this well, but hopefully you get the idea 😅

Also: one of the major paths unlocks a special ending. Not saying more.

🛠️ What else I Changed This Week

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🎙️ Old Dialogue Adjustments

I removed the "can’t save" restriction during Diego’s first conversation.
Originally, I wanted it to feel more intense like a mini-game. But it felt a bit unfair to make his scene uniquely punishing.
Now it flows better and is more accessible, I will save the can’t save restriction for another time 😛.

Bonus: thanks to new pre-beerpong content, it’s now easier to unlock Diego’s unique artwork. Patreons who read past logs know what I’m talking about with more precision ;)

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🖼️ Old Artwork Polish

I went back and improved some older images, cleaner lines, better lighting, more consistency and overall better quality.
You might not even notice the difference since it lost some quality to upload, but the main nightclub background is one example that’s been touched up and I felt the differences were significant.

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🎵 Music & Sound

I added a new track for ”funny moments”!
Still working on expanding my music library, though any tips or free sources are welcome.

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🎨 Sprite Updates

My boyfriend has been helping me a lot since the beginning (he’s been awesome 💙).
While I write this devlog, he’s been refining several character sprites both for new characters coming in v0.2 and for older ones to improve overall quality and consistency.
That includes polishing Diego’s sprite (yes, even a shirtless version 😏), a Harry version where he is not drunk and a new guest that you may or may not get to meet during beerpong.

(No promises that all of those sprite updates will make it into this patch but progress is being made!)

Also, a shout out to Viv, a close friend of mine who reviewed more than 40,000 words of content for me. She is an absolute legend 🙌

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✅ What’s Next?

• Review all scenes written so far and polish them

• Finish the third beerpong path up to the match

• Write the beerpong scene itself (likely a narrative event, not a minigame, unless you want one?)

• Write the pong match and it’s ending

• Review earlier paths of V 0.1 to ensure all routes lead smoothly into the beerpong setup

• Re-check all Decision Echoes and make sure character memory, past choices and their scores are updated accordingly

• Add new music and SFX (if possible)

• Start writing the aftermatch scene, where you’ll choose which character to spend time with (likely only released in v0.3)

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🧠 Final Thoughts

This week wasn't just about content, it was about recognizing limits, adjusting pace, and remembering that Trueclash should be built with passion, not pressure that we so many times impose on ourselves.

Thank you for reading, for understanding, and for being here on the start of this journey.
Whether you’re a patron or not, your support means the world to me.

Let’s keep building something meaningful… one scene at a time 💙

– Zak