These last few months have been very eventful for me. I've been working 10 hours a day, just to make sure I could do the updates I needed to Just Friends. As you all know, Just Friends is being developed on Godot Engine, and Godot is not an engine for Visual Novels. IT's a general game engine. However because of that, it usually is far easier to do things the way you want, the problem is that you have to do everything by hand. You don't have anything done and working. It's not like taking Ren'py and already having a gallery system done and working, and having a scene system that will give you everything from skip functionality to visuals already pre-made. 

However, no matter how good the deal looks, taking Ren'py was a big no no for me. It all happened years ago when I tried to use it and I noticed the way scripts works there is not like they work on RPG Maker. 

You see, it's ironic that not even Visual Novel Maker, made by the same company as RPG maker doesn't have a message system as good as RPG maker has. Creating a scene, with dialogues and branches is so easy and interesting in RPG maker, so when I developed Just Friends on Godot, I made sure I could do something similar.

But with time, comes new situations, and we end up needing more options. 

The last four to five months I've been planning to switch between Godot 3 to 4.

Just Friends was never created to be a huge VN but it became one because the setup was nice. However it was limited in what could do and I could not use its systems for other visual novels if I wanted. So I started working on 'Porting' Just Friends to Godot 4.

What I learned these last few months is that I had to redo the script system for the days, because I wanted multiple characters on screen, to the very least I wanted three. It took a long time but I was able to recreate the system with some help of a few friends giving me some tips here and there, 

It took me five months, during this time I had to both keep updating Just Friends on Godot 3 for my patrons while working on this as a side project. The last two to three months I stopped working on Just Friends of Godot 3 entirely to start fully porting Just Friends to Godot 4. 

And now it's done. Last month, Visual Novel Core: Just Friends Script Loaded Build 0.12 was released for my patrons, but this last month I finished the Visual Novel Core build 1.0, with it, I branched Just Friends out of it, and now Just Friends is back on track with Build 0.69.0.43.

The 43 is the Godot version. 

So what is new on Visual Novel Core compared to Just Friends Core from Godot 3?

Visual Novel Core was created to handle multiple visual novels, here's the characteristics of  the engine:

1. It can hold up to three characters on screen, this number could be enhanced eventually to more but the math is not mathin and I have no interest in showing more than three characters at a time on the screen.
2. The engine fully supports Wide-screen now.
3. The base resolution is 1920x1080, the game scale it down to 1280x720, but it can be scaled up to 4K. The higher the resolution the less "sharp" the resources can be shown but they are scaled up to any resolution you use. (If one day I can fetch a 4K monitor, I can start working with that resolution as the base resolution, but that's more of a issue I face with my own rig not a Godot thing).
4. The game now supports Dynamic Windowed mode, Full Scren Borderless mode and Priority Full Screen mode.
5. The game have four sliders for audio, one for each basic sound and one for it's master volume. 
6. The engine allows you to Skip dialog from the get go, but that needs to be enabled in the configurations.
7. The game engine has a new notification window for characters mood as you answer them, depending on the quality of the answer they can be closer or not from you, each character can have special messages but there's a stock message for any new character added.
8. The gallery system is entirely procedural: If there's images in the image folder or songs in the audio folder the gallery will populate itself accordingly automatically.
9. The entire theming is made inside of Godot instead of loading outside images, all of the theming can be centralized (and it is) making it far easier to change the UI of the game if needed.
10. The credits now will always last the same amount of time as the credits music, and the credits always load a special file instead of having to be manually updated inside of the game.  A skip feature for the credits will be made eventually.
11. All menus are padronized.
12. There's a new "help" menu for showing how certain aspects of the system works in case of doubts, such as how Save/Load works, or how to activate features that are disabled by default such as Skip and Mood messages.
13. All menus are fully touch compatible.
14. The engine verify if you're playing the game on Android or PC systems, and makes sure to display the corresponding buttons (Android UI have bigger buttons). And Android builds are way better now.

Those are the actual engine changes.

Here are the changes on Just Friends build 0.69.0.43:

Some of the things may be repeated in the image but there's also stuff for the game there :) For now I'll go work on pushing the menus and UI back to what Just Friends should have and pushing the remaining routes for Johan who were left out during the conversion part of the scripts to Godot 4 given the time I started the conversion I had to keep up with the old engine for a few months.

Ok this was a big post. Sorry about that.

Thank you all for following me here, and if you want to check the new build, consider supporting me on Patreon as a Tier 2!

Thank you so much.