Development Update #25 - The gallery road.

Hello there guys! I hope you all are having an amazing day.

Today I'm proud to announce I'm almost done with the skeleton of the gallery.

But first:

What will we have in the gallery for Just Friends:

The answer is simple: Four sections, three images related and one sound related. On the next alpha, you will be able to open the gallery from the get-go and play any of the current songs in the game. Not only that, as long as you're in the "Sound" section of the gallery, in addition to being able to listen to the songs, you can also see their original information bellow. So even pieces of music that you're not able to listen to yet because it's not a place you can visit yet. 

- The main menu now has a gallery button. I decided to make it a button instead of a cue in the window because I want to keep consistency. I'm still thinking of making these buttons less round though...

About the image sections, we have three of them: Backgrounds, Characters, and Bonding Images. Backgrounds will, of course, show you any background you already saw (in theory), Characters will be unlocked after you finish a character route with S-Rank, so only on the last day after seeing the final ending (in theory again) and the Bonding Images will be released after you see any of the bonding scenes in-game. Or at least that's what I think will happen for now. 

Now there's an issue I need to address right now: It's not possible with my system, for now at least, to let you play through a scene itself. Like, in a contained way, like some games on Ren'Py software can.

Remember, my game runs a code who reads a JSON file with more than 10k lines and it plays while reading. Every single text, every single avatar, every single song and background, animations on those avatars, are all inside the JSON as text. 

When a dialog ends, it goes to the next, when the route ends, it will go to the next route anchored to the last route. If there's not a route anchored it will go to the next day, if there's not the next day it will go back to the title. That's how the game works right now.

Right now it's impossible for me to even jeg rig something so you can quickly replay a scene. 

-The music gallery should wort without a slider. Every time a music button is added, the code should adjust itself to always be centralized.

Differently than Ren'py who creates scenes where you enter and exit every part of the game and the developer can run that scene independently than the rest of the game, in my case, to make it easier for me to correct the text, I kinda sacrificed the individual scene situation (And believe me, with a game with more than 15k routes, you can imagine how difficult it would be to open scene by scene until we can find the current one with the text problem and correct the text, some games like Camp Buddy is on  version 1.1 and it still has some text issues and character HUD issues they didn't fix yet and that game is made on Ren'py). 

- In the first stages of the gallery, I test it in its node. That's why it's so different sometimes.

Godot, just like Ren'py does run in scenes, however, my game only has two scenes: Title and Main. Main is where the entire gameplays. Like I said, all texts inside the game, aren't inside Godot, but inside a JSON file. While on Ren'py, every single text and event are inside the editor itself instead of a separate file. So yeah, I have few ideas of how to bring you guys the "Play scene" stuff, like making a separate JSON file for each scene just to play on the gallery BUT I don't know how to do that yet, because the Title scene (where the gallery runs), is not able and wasn't made to run a JSON file like the main is. 

Then again, I have a few ideas of how can I overcome this, but right now I don't think the scene situation will matter at all. The first milestone of my game will be to close the first Demo. Demo 1.0 will be the culmination of all the alphas until the end of the third day with Karnal. The gallery is a mandatory system to be working by then, but I don't think it's mandatory for me to spend so much time right now (with so little time that I already have available in my hands ) trying to create a separate space where a scene can run without issues and, of course, creating each scene as a separable JSON. Because like I said: If a scene ends it will try to go to the next Route. So it's the case if you starting to play a scene, and then playing through the entire day again. Worse: When you go back to the gallery, which is inside the title scene, the gallery will be closed because, when we switch scenes on Godot, the previous scene "dies", or it's killed so it won't run on your computer without being used. 

- The music Gallery was the first part of the gallery I've done. It was incredibly satisfying, and I knew it would be somewhat easier than the scrollable images section. Note that I will probably need to adjust the bottom part of the information screen when I add two more songs to this list in the future.

So for now, the Bonding Images are just for you to check the sex and lewd images (There's none in the game right now), and any bonding images that are displayed in-game (such like that beautiful scene where Wagner just decided to rub sunscreen on the player's butt). 

So, I want to say here: I'm sorry about that, it's not a thing I think it's plausible to do right now, it's a project for the future, there are some ways to do it and if I want to do it, I need to do it in a way I won't break the entire game. It's being such a pain to just make those buttons behave. 

- Thank god I can make gifs. At this stage, I was able to test the buttons on the game, but for some reason, the songs couldn't play anymore in the gallery node. But they work on the game itself, that's what matters. Have you noticed that I always add a temporary text on the buttons just to count them and see if something's wrong? This way I can find problems like the last row of buttons missing without needing to manually count the buttons in game.

As I said, the three image sections, in theory, will work that way, but right now they don't work at all. What you will be able to check on the "Backgrounds" tab, is just a dummy skeleton that won't do a thing (You can see in the gif above), for now at least, and the other two will display a message of "Under Development", but you must understand that even the Background section is under development. The visual is only the first part of it and we don't have 20 backgrounds right now. I just want you to be able to feel how the gallery will look in the end game, somehow. Also, I'm proud as hell of the layout and positions of the buttons, I hate math but I love when I'm smart enough to use it right, yep, in case you don't know every single thing in the game isn't positioned manually. It's all math. Making it display each box in the correct area is the first part of it. 

- This is the message you will see if you click any other buttons for now. The only part who works on the gallery, however, IS the music part. Remember that.

I still need to code a ton of stuff, and if it took me three freaking weeks to figure out how to make this list of buttons work (Yeah, Godot in 2D doesn't have the best documentation yet so we need to be... creative in some ways with a lot of try and error since there are not so many visual novels made in Godot), it will take me a lot of time to make this part work.

Whenever I'm able to make the gallery images to work, I'll need to adapt the JSON files to send "cues" to the game code on where a Gallery image is or not active. Not only that, I will need to make a Save File specifically for the Gallery itself, or at least a system file to save gallery information. Since it needs to be permanent and persistent.

That will be made in phases too, so as soon as the "background" gallery is working, I'll upload an alpha again (next alpha will come with the music working I'm just testing it a lot to make sure it works).

So, there's a long way to that, but at least I was able to make the music part work so you guys can listen to any music of the game on loop (Well, they should loop if they don't, please tell me and I'll fix it).

- This is how each button looks at this point in the gallery. I don't know what I'll do to make this work, but this is what you'll be able to see in the game if you open it. Remember: Music only works on the music part. The rest of the gallery is silent right now.

Anyways, the gallery system is being created and I'm happy with the outcome so far. There's still way too much to do so it starts working, but I'm glad nonetheless.

I hope you guys like the outcome when the new alpha releases. I'm trying to make Wagner work his part and color all Karnal's character sprite so we have new art stuff in the game and if possible some backgrounds, but we'll see.

For now, that's the news I can share with you guys. If it's not entirely clear why I can't give you the scene replay, I can make a post dedicated just to that, I can even share some prints of how Godot scenes and ren'py scenes work, and why I only use two scenes (but at this point you already understand it way easier to find a problem within a text document than within tons of folders inside an editor with tons of scenes for each part of the game, right?), but the explanation will be more technical than it needs to be, because of as much as I want to explain it in a simple way, I'm not so good with that. I'll do my best if needed. 

So, see you guys later and we'll see each other again on the next alpha release!