Development Update - December 2023 -

Hello there guys. I've been working nonstop on Johan's last parts for his first day, so next build we'll finally have his entire first day with Aiden completed. I'm still waiting for my cue on his expressions, so it'll take some time for it to be done.

Now, I came here to talk about another aspect of the game that is slowly developing: Sound Effects. 

Sound Effects are to be implemented on Just Friends, but so far I never found good ones, I tried everywhere, and for months and months, I've been searching for a good website with good samples while also being royalty-free, meaning I can use it for commercial purposes without problems. I finally was able to find some samples that seem good enough, but I still need to test them in-game.  So far, these are the following sound effects I was able to fetch that felt good for the game, just remember there are two kinds of sound effects: Ambience and Effects, ambiance will always be playing once called while Effects will play only once per call. 

The following Sound Effects I was able to find, and edit/trim to fit the game (and yes, their licenses allow me to do so):

- Beach - Walking on Sand.

- Bar - Walking on wooden floor.

- Park - Walking on Leaves/Grass alone.

- Park - Walking on Leaves/Grass together.

- Asphalt / Concrete - Walking on Sidewalk.

And here is the ambiance I found for the following maps:

- Beach - Sea Waves.

- Clearing - Daytime/Evening - Birds.

- Park / Clearing - Night Time

- Park - Night Time Insects.

- Park - Daytime / Evening - Wind through Leaves.

- Pub/Bar - Daytime /  Evening.

- Pub/Bar - Night Time.

- Restaurant -  Uncrowded.

- Restaurant - Crowded.

- Sports Court - People Playing Basketball.

There are still some more I want to find, such as people talking at a hotel reception, and so on.

Ambiance will run in the background with the music, so it'll be two songs playing at the same time. Now please understand, that these are royalty-free songs, they are not recorded by studios, nor were they made to be professionally used, meaning they aren't loop-perfect. However, they are pretty damn good and will add another layer of complexity to the game that it's still missing.

Now that I found a good chunk of sounds, I consider this at least 20% complete for Sound Effects, so what's missing? 

Well, I need to do a few things, let me list for you guys:

I need to --

• Create and Implement the code for the game to recognize and play other audio streams, one for Ambiance with a loop already active, and another for effects that will not loop.
• I then need to implement in the Day code, functions to call for the Sound Effects and Sound Ambiance from JSON file while reading the day.
• I need to code and implement another set of code for the JSON editor to recognize the songs and save them on the JSON files.
• After all of this is implemented I need to create a dummy day to start testing, to see if Sound Effects play nice while Ambiance and Music play correctly when called to play or stop too.
• I also need to make sure the Save File is Saving the current Ambiance/Music that is playing, since they are not called every dialog to play, so if you save after they are called, the game needs to remember they were called before. 
• If the test above is successful, I need to implement in the Configuration Menu a slider for both Ambiance and Sound Effects for you to adjust as much as you want in your gameplay.
• Finally, once I can confirm the sliders work, I need to make sure this informations are saved correctly in the configuration save file.
• Once both Save Files are confirmed to be saving the new information they have, I can finally start putting the Ambiance/SFX in the game days.
• After the game have them in, I also need to add to the gallery the Credits for the Ambiance and SFX.

Now here's the catch: I will need to read every single day and every single route, to identify when to Call for an ambiance and when to call for it to stop. Sometimes, the same place doesn't have the same ambiance, such as the park, or Clearing, that during the night would have a different ambiance playing.  

So I predict that implementing the code and making sure the entire system works fine saving everything without issues should take an entire month. A system implemented does not mean you guys would be able to enjoy that yet, instead it just means the game is now ready to receive these sound effects in the JSON.

The second part of the plan is what make sure you can hear those sounds, and that should take another full month, the days are super huge at this point and I need to check every route constantly to make sure when to add them sounds.  The most difficult part will be the Sound Effects themselves, to add them in the very specific parts when Aiden tells you he's walking with Karnal Wagner or Johan somewhere.  These are the true tricky ones which means I will have to re-read through all of the main routes at least, and well sometimes when doing it I get annoyed by my text so I start re-writing it and it's a slow process.

So what should we do now? 

I will be allowing my Tier 3+ patrons to keep voting for what they want in the game, if they vote for me to focus on Sound Effects I will. This means though that if the game has any updates on Patreon it will mostly be bug fixes which I'm always finding and fixing as I test the game every day. I also always port a new version for the month if we have new patrons, those are minor updates, and will change the last number before the 35 at the end which identifies what version of Godot I'm using.

If you guys keep voting for me to Write more routes, I will work on those, and on any free time I have left I will keep slowly working on the sidelines to implement the code, in a way that does not break the game at all. If I have any more advances on the game on that front you guys will see the percentage in the Roadmap growing. 

So that's it about Sound Effects. I'm glad I found some good ones, now I just need the time, and the effort to make them in the game, which should take me two months only working on that, or a lot more months if I'm working on it slowly on the free time I have. 

Now, let's talk about something else: 

What about Android?

Godot is able to port games to Android. However, the issue is that when I started projecting Just Friends, the idea was to release this game solely for PC and Linux. That being said I noticed that a lot of people are playing Visual Novels on their smartphones now. Not everyone has a laptop or a PC (Which I find fascinating since I can't imagine my life without a device that allows me to do anything, from Gaming to Working to Multimedia, in a comfortable way, and a smartphone is not that for me). 

So what do I need to port a game for Android:

I need the Android SDKs for Godot, which is not hard to find, then I need to configure the engine to port to Android. After that, I need to try and port the current version of the game to Android and see how it will work on my device. Then I need to start taking notes on WHAT I should change on the UI to make it Android ready, and if those changes can be applied for both versions (PC/Android) or if I need to create a different set of menus only for Android.

If the latter is the answer, then this will take some time. Because I will have to create two UI's for the game, and I have no idea how to swap between them, I will need to study a lot and check a lot of Godot documentation about it, and remember: I'm using Godot 3.5 and the actual engine is already on 4.2 meaning finding the correct documentation is a pain in the ass. 

In the worst-case scenario, I would find myself being forced to port my entire game to Godot 4.2 which would take a long time and I would only be able to do it in my free time, without taking time from the actual game (essentially creating a second branch of the game for updating it for the new engine while working on the current one without changing it, then once the new version is updated, just moving the updated days to the new engine and testing, doing a lot of tests to make sure everything works).

I love Godot, I really do. The fact that I created my own Script Editor, and I can easily pinpoint where a text is wrong and quickly fix it (a thing that is very annoying to do on big projects on Ren'py) makes it worth it. But truth be told, Ren'py also ports to Android without much trouble, so I need to check the Android versions vs the PC versions of other Visual Novels to take some notes. Android ports are possible, however, they may not feel good with the current UI, so once I'm able to export the game I will release it for you guys to test, I just can't guarantee they will work perfectly at first. Just remember that. 

But that's it for now. These are the new changes and updates I'm planning and slowly working on every day I have some free time to do. Soon Just Friends will have more life and be more interesting to play and I hope that adding the Android version will also bring to Patreon the people who can't play the game on PC for some reason. 

I hope you all have a nice day, and back to work, I go. Thank you for supporting me and for reading this long post. You guys are awesome.