Hello there! A few days ago (three to be exact), I published the first of many public releases for the game. The truth is, the development of Just Friends is slow, and there are some reasons for that, one of them being that I constantly have around 20 - 25 patrons, and the amount I make per month is around 120 to 150USD, and maybe that's enough when converted to my currency for me to pay my regular bills and barely stay in business with this game, but it's definitely not enough for me to invest heavily on the game.

My skillset is resumed to coding, visual design (I arrange and create all UI elements in the game except artworks), and writing.

This means currently I'm the only person who codes anything new into the game, who writes anything new for the story, who spends hours and hours of the week revising any new and old text and making sure all the information that is displayed for you guys are correct, who puts all of this text inside the new text inside the game, who tests the builds for bugs and crashes in any platform possible and who spend hours checking all of the patron related correction suggestions too. 

This also means I don't have certain skillsets needed to make this game better and more robust, such as creating artwork or music, for example. All of the current music in Just Friends are royalty-free and have the credits given to their correct owners, all of the artwork is the fruit of labor the artist Wagner Mutt gave me after months of doing it, there are a lot of reasons for the artwork to take a long time to come by here, the lack of money is one of them, it takes a long time for me to save enough to buy something, but he's gracious enough to take his free time and give me concept arts and sketches without me asking because he's just an awesome person who helps me a lot. That being said, any new artwork needs to be paid and he only finishes or realizes the concepts once he's paid, after all, we all need to survive. 

So, as an attempt to bring more visibility to Just Friends, seeing that I need at least double of what I'm making to be able to speed up artwork production, for example, the alphas patrons receive are already being released for the public, the idea is to jump a few numbers until the public builds get only five builds behind the patrons builds. Not only that, but any public build updates will have major development logs here too, together with development logs for the Patreon builds too, this way you who is not a patron but follow me here will know when a build is released here and when it's released on Patreon too.

Of course, if you follow me on Twitter, that means you also get the updates there, but I want to give updates in every single place I can.

If for some reason you feel attracted to the story of my game, to the characters and think it has the potential to grow bigger and better, please, consider supporting me over on www.patreon.com/yekkusu I know it's like a broken record, but there are tons of projects who die off because they don't raise enough money, and I don't want Just friends to be one of them.

In the following months I'll be making new dev logs here, talking about other stuff as the change arise, so be aware of that. But for now, lemme answer some questions for you all:

Q: How much do you need, to speed up the game production?

A: There's the bare minimum I need to survive, right now this amount is around 160USD or more every month, and that is just to make me able to focus on the game only without having to have a second job, and that's with the risk of the inflation here to fuck me up badly together with the volatility of my currency, adding the fact that Patreon is grabbing more and more for them, to a point that if you give me 6 Bucks patreon will have 2.5 for them. The desired amount for me to be able to survive and invest in the game is around 350USD. Any more than that is literally going to speed up the project and also will quick start another visual novel I have on my mind, one that has way more characters and a very big complexity.  

Q: How can I help you besides being over your Patreon?

A: There are a few ways. You can donate here when you download a build, as many times as you want. You can become a Tier 4 patron, those 20bucks help me immensely you have no idea. You can send money directly to my Paypal, and so on.

Q: Will my name be in the credits if I become a Patron?

A: Yes. As soon as you become any tier on my patreon, your name is set on a permanent list on the credits for the game.

Q: Will my name get pulled off the credits if I stop supporting the project?

A: No. Unless you request your name not to be added, your name will be forever stuck in the credits. Usually the name there is the name you use on Patreon. 

Q: How many characters the game will have?

A: Currently the game has two characters, but I plan to add at least one more. However, if the game gets more support and patrons start asking for more than three characters, I believe it's possible to vamp up the number of characters to six, I would need to do some changes here and there and maybe ask the artist to create a new map for the game with more locations, but so far, the idea is having three characters in the game. 

Q: What engine do you use to create your game?

A: I created the game on the Godot engine, it started on version 2.0 and it was since then updated to version 3.1, the reason is that none of the current visual novel makers in the market has an easy way to add and edit dialogues in the game. Let's suppose I find some weird phrases or issues with a text two years after the game started being developed, instead of going through an absurd amount of scenes trying to find the issue, I can just navigate directly to the issue by checking what route, and what dialogue is the problem. Any Patron is able to send a suggestion, warning what text is wrong and what to fix, and I can literally fix it in seconds. That's only possible because I create the entire game system on my own, so my game adapts to my needs instead of me, trying to adapt to the rules of the other tools who give me everything but is annoyingly hard to fix simple issues later down the development. 

How can I check what changed between builds?

Inside every single build, there's a menu called: Change Log. Since those were builds made by patrons, and I never created a special build for the public because I don't think it's necessary, you can just open that menu and read what changed and what didn't. Some places have even images for you to check and compare with the new changes. 

Should I stay supporting you for this project to end?

Well, usually, yes. I can't ask you to stop doing what you need to do because of me, but if donating 3$ is not a big hit on your wallet, I would appreciate it if you keep supporting me. After all, my patrons are the ones who decide what I work on, and they are the ones who pay my salary, if all of them decide to leave me, I would have to cancel the project. But I won't hold against you if you need to leave, but remember you're always welcome to come back again! 

I want to thank every single one of you who've been downloading and testing Just Friends build 0.23, I also want to thank any older patrons and current patrons who are reading this; You guys are the reason I can work on this game, which is my love and passion. I will be posting here when the next build is released for Patrons and in a few months when the next public build is released here. I'm thinking of also updating my ko-fi page with the public releases too, but I need to check how that website works. 

Anyway, thank you for reading this update, and remember: If you like the game at least a little, you can share the main page for anyone to check it out!