Development Update #43

Hello there you guys. I'm here today to talk a little about the development of the game.

Since you all already know, Tier 3 + patrons decide now what I should be working on every month in the game. Sometimes the decisions may be easier than others, meaning the amount of work that it'll be done by the end of the month can vary. 

But that being said; in the times I take some time for myself every day, I actually think about what I should implement in the game, code-wise. For the next project, for example, I want two or more characters on a screen, so that's a thing I'll implement one day, but Just Friends doesn't need that, because it was fractured in a way only one character needs to appear at a time in the screen given the size of the sprites and the fact that the screen can be scaled at any given point in real-time, I don't want sprites bugging inside each other. 

But, I really try to think about what to make here, in the Just Friends Build of my game. And I think there are some small things, like implementing sound effects, and by doing that, also adding SFX on the settings menu needs to be addressed too, which can change a lot of code since the game does scale in a very specific way again. Another silly thing I wanna do is the Day/Time filter, I don't know if it's possible in a natural way without fucking up the entire background, but I can try. This way I wouldn't need to ask Wagner to make variants of the same background, the less work he has on the backgrounds the more he can spend in bondings scenes and sex scenes, more sprites, and so on.

But I think one of the most interesting features I can add, and I want to add, is the next gallery feature: The Concept/Unused art gallery, a gallery that will be unlocked with specific info, info that I need to think about, by the way.  But the idea here is that after you finish the game twice or three times, you actually get a "flag" that unlocks the gallery, where you can see old sprites, sketches from old versions of backgrounds, scenes, concept art that were discarded, and so on. 

That's a thing I'll probably add on the next pool, and this kind of thing would take more than a month to do because I really need to figure out how to make the flag at the end of the game work, and gather all the unused artworks that are NOT in the game, add to the game, then add to the gallery in an organized way. 

And remember: There's no way for me to try and "organize" automatically or just move an image to a folder and my code will magically add the image to the gallery. Since Godot has a very specific structure, I need to, every four sets of images, duplicate a certain node in the gallery section. I'm still figuring out how to make something more automatic but as far as I can tell, those methods only work on the debug version of the game, meaning: Only while Godot is running here with the source code, once I close the game for you guys you would never be able to see a single image because OS complexity and other stuff.

But I'm learning, so every failed attempt before led me to the current system right now.

And don't worry guys, I promise you all that I have lots of classes here in my game, there's not one class for the entire game like some certain games over there. (Yeah I saw some terrible code those last years from other people and it hurts my eyes).

Now besides the story, there is some stuff I really wanna do for the game but that relies only on Wagner right now, and since art costs money I need to save for a while. But a soon as all Backgrounds are completed and at least all three main characters have their set of sprites, I'll be opening some new Tier. Tier 5 and Tier 6. Those tiers are very specific and limited, I need to study how they will work, but the main idea would be that you as a patron stays in that tier for a set amount of time, and when this time ends, the tier will be closed for you, but as long as you're paying on the tier, no one else can grab your spot.

Essentially, if you pay, for example, five months of 80 bucks, you will have your character taking the place of one of the sub-characters in my story. That's just a mock price, but you get the gist. Since you will be getting a full portrait yourself and your portrait will be featured inside the game replacing any character I made (but the names I gave the characters won't change), you'll be featured in the game, your name will be in a separate place of the credits to show who your character is there and so on, this tier means essentially you'll be paying for the artwork and for the work I'll be having to apply it on the game. Again, I'm still thinking about the set rules so nothing here is set in stone, but one thing is for sure: Those tiers will have the character name in them, so you'll be able to apply for the character you want, meaning if the character has female gender, that's is the gender your character will be assuming. OF COURSE, I will make sure to explain everything at the time, and this can only be done AFTER those artworks I mentioned above are done. 

So yeah, there are things I intend to add to the game.

I also want new music for the game, but I'm a person who thinks any job should be well paid, and right now I can't pay for the artwork and music at the same time, it's impossible guys.  But the game is in constant development, and I thank you all for your support guys.

Thank you for your time reading this, and thank you for supporting me this month too. You guys are amazing.

If you know any friend who likes Visual Novels and is willing to help as any tier here, please share the demo with them and this patreon too!

I also have a Ko-Fi on my Twitter pinned tweet, so if any of you are interested in helping just a little more, you can always tip me there, at least Ko-Fi doesn't charge you extra for helping me and doesn't grab a chunk of the money for themselves as Patreon does.

And I'm still salty that Patreon wants to change the billing system here in a way that would wreck almost every single creator here, at least for now they backed off, but I really wish there were any other solutions that worked with Paypal, sadly there are none right now. 

And that's the saddest part of having almost no one competing with you in a market. They get lazy and greedy.

Anyway, I hope you all have a nice day, thank you all for everything.

See you all next time!