HEY HELLO HI, IT'S CARROT.

First off, I just wanna give a giant...

...big ol'...

...highfalutin...

...Brobdingnagian...

Because never once in my life could I imagine getting so many plays??? HELP?????

I don't know what to say.

But I am eternally grateful, honored, blessed, heart squished, gonna jump into a well for sixty years before crawling out like some demonic vegetalian creature with a grudge, come bring coffee for you after you're done working and then become very awkward because I'M SORRY BUT I'M JUST LIKE THAT, I don't even know where I'm going with this anymore, what is this turning into, I'm just gonna end this sentence now.

Anyway.

Um.

Absolutely tickled pink that people enjoy these two dorks. And I hope anyone that does like these two dorks and hasn't p-p-played the main game might also like them in that, too. Because it's also filled with dorkery. And The Gay. And The Feels. And-... well, a whole lot of stuff that would take more than a sentence to sum up so I'll just leave that here for now.

But let's move on from that, shall we, since there's only so long I can spout gratitude-infused platitudes before it becomes trite. I have taken... THE NEXT STEP... in my game dev career. YES!!! I have conquered... THE ANDROID BUILD.

DAH DAH DAH.

To be honest, this was something I had been wanting to do for a while anyway. I had even created a new mobile version project of it in Ren'Py already. But since the first time I tried to open it on the emulator and everything was completely messed up and none of the animations worked correctly and some of the text wasn't even visible and iT WAS JUST A MESS OK I kinda lost my motivation as it seem like A Lot of Work. HOWEVER. A month or however long later this is from when I did that, I finally turned my cap around and decided I was going to do this thing or die trying. (Fortunately, no death occurred.)

BUT WHY WAS IT SO HARD, CARROT?????

Well, some of it was probably unique to this game itself and wouldn't be the case for other games. You might be thinking—but isn't this a game literally about texting??? So shouldn't it be easy???? AND YOU WOULD THINK, YES. However. First off. Despite much of the game being in a vertically conducive texting format, not all of the game is. The main menu isn't. The scene with Iggy at the end isn't. None of the menus are. And while I could have completely reworked all of those things to fit in a vertical format, it would have taken like 4x the work even just doing what I have did, so I decided to forego it (though who knows, maybe in the future I'll attempt).

SECOND OFF AND HERE'S THE MAIN THING—TEXT NEEDS TO BE BIGGER? ON MOBILE?? SO PEOPLE CAN READ IT EASILY????

Which meant........ well just take a look:

Every singe one of the menus was screwed up.......... in particular the side bit with the animated messages.

For some reason Genzou's text was invisible???? I eventually figured out it was because it was all the way on the right-hand side of the screen but it took me a while. Also though you can't see it here because the screenshot is being weird on the emulator, the typing animations for Iggy's messages was broken because the blue boxes I have to cover the text until the ellipsis animation is done was now too small and also not positioned correctly, so it was like, half on the words.

LITERALLY EVERYTHING WAS OUT OF ALIGNMENT GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Yeah the first time I opened up the emulator and saw all this I was like WELL SCREW THIS, hence why it took me so long to return to it alkdjfasd

But return to it I did.

The first thing I did was fix Genzou's text, because that felt pretty integral. And at first I thought it was like, gone completely or something, in which case I would have no idea what to do, which would render everything moot. But after a lot of trial and error playing with numbers I did finally get that back where it belonged.

Then I went to town on the menus. Had to manually reposition all of the pop-up message buttons. Had to manually re-arrange things on the various screens.

Then finally the most time-consuming part. Because of the way I originally coded this with a lot of ad-hoc manual placement of the animations, I ended up needing to go carefully through the entire game and fix a whole of alignment numbers. Some of it involved just updating the screens I use for the animations, which helped a lot (though took a lot of trial and error to get THOSE right). But even with the updated screens, a lot of alignment still happened on the individual line level, and since the message boxes were bigger now because of the bigger text, many had to be readjusted. And also some of Iggy's lines were now three lines instead of two because of the bigger text, so that meant creating another new "extra large" typing animation. IT WAS JUST A LOT. And I am glad this game is so short because otherwise I definitely would not have gotten through it GOD.

All of those numbers had to be manually adjusted while playing through the game because even in the original everything was just eyeballed EL OH EL. Also a lot of the 'typing' screens needed to become 'typinglarge' and some of the 'typinglarge' screens needed to become a new 'typingextralarge'.

And then even once I'd finally finished with the texting portion of the game, there was the final non-texting part... WHICH WAS ALSO OUT OF ALIGNMENT. Cue more manual adjustment. I also decided to make the little date text that appears at the start of each day bigger because I noticed it was quite small when on the phone. OH AND ALSO THE HOW TO PLAY AND CONTENT WARNING SCREENS. Those were images, so I redid them so the text was larger and also changed the wording of the how to play to tap rather than click/press ENTER because obviously people cannot do those things on mobile!!

It was a lot more than I had originally thought I'd need to do for sure.

However.

A game that was coded better to begin with would probably not have all these issues LOL also a game with less manual animation and finagling. Probably if I just didn't have the text be bigger I wouldn't have had at least some of these issues...... but I wanted to ensure it wasn't too small to read on the phone?? Because otherwise it felt like what's the point???

Anyway. I finally got the build reworked. Which meant I was done, right? The hard part was over. No more work. Yes, everything would be smooth sailing...............

WELL CRAP.

LOLZ WHO KNEW CREATING THE APK WOULD END UP BEING SO FRUSTRATING?????

I went into Ren'Py to take a look, and the build option was grayed out and said I needed to install some Java JDK thingiemabob. It's at this point that I must tell everyone that I actually am Not a Very Good Programmer. So. I don't actually understand most of these things............ Well, I would give it a try. I clicked on the button directly in Ren'Py that opened some site to download it. I was a bit confused because when I opened the site it didn't look like Java or whatever this JDK thing was at all, it was like some Adoptium... Temurin... OpenJDK whats-it. But I figured since it was linked it was the right one, so I downloaded and installed.

OK now it's not grayed out anymore...

BUT WHEN I TRY TO INSTALL SDK AND CREATE KEYS AN ERROR APPEARS.

WEEP.

Hm. So it was at this point that I started troubleshooting/researching. First it turns out that you need to set some JAVA_HOME thing in your system environment variables. Interesting. I do this. It still doesn't do anything. Trying desperately to figure out what's wrong. Oh, apparently it needs to be a specific version of Java? Like the version I'm using is actually too recent? Ok I need JDK8 or something. I look up JDK8. Which is somehow very hard to find?? Also there's all these different version numbers I don't understand. Somehow when I open the Oracle site for JDK8 it directs me to Java 20. Maybe these are the same thing, I have no idea. So I download and install that one. Then have to reset the JAVA_HOME thing. Try again. Still nothing. I'm losing my mind by this point. I keep searching. Keep researching. What is Java SE 8? Is that JDK8? I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING??? I find an exact version number that has an 8 in it: jdk-8u361. Try to download. I NEED TO CREATE A FREAKING ORACLE ACCOUNT. And not only that, it asks for so much information GOD. Ok Oracle, meet Carrot Carrot from Carrot 123, Carrot, phone number 123456789. Finally, this new (old) version is mine. I install it. Do it all again. Update the JAVA_HOME.

...

........

......................

FINALLY IT WORKS.

THANK GOD.

It proceeds to ask me a bunch of configuration questions about the build that I'm not sure how to answer, so I had to do a bunch of research for those, too. Though at this point, I don't care, I'm just glad I got it working. It creates the APK. I email it to my phone. Try it out for the first time...........

T-T-T-T-TEARS IN MY EYES.

Yeah, OK, I will admit, seeing it load up on the phone for the first time was pretty cool. I felt like a Real Developer or something. A pretty cool feeling. Makes me want to make Android builds for my other games???? Though that's a bit scary as they're quite a bit longer, so the amount of work worries me LOL Though they'd have a lot less manual animation finagling than this one, so who knows...

There was still a bit of work to be done. Some Q&A of the build while testing on the phone. Fixing some last small things. Also had to figure out the icon, because that turned out to be more than just sticking a square image in the folder, it had to be like, two different images? A foreground and a background? So had to decide how I was gonna do that. But by that point, the remaining things were quite quick and fast compared to the work that preceded them lakdjfa

AND THEN THAT WAS THAT.

IT WAS FINISHED.

I felt very accomplished ✌️

And I hope that people will enjoy the Android version!! It somehow feels very special. Now I can have Genzy in my pocket wherever I go HHHHHHH. I shall weep maybe. I am unsure how many people play on mobile?? Especially as I never do, so I feel a bit out of my element in general. But according to other devs, mobile builds constitute a good percentage of their downloads. So we'll see! At any rate, I hope that people who do just play on mobile will now be able to play if they want!

That's pretty much it, I guess. My Android journey or something. Like always, I have turned this devlog into something far too ridiculously long for its own good, so I won't keep elongating this more than it need be. But thank you again everyone for your support on this little game! It really and truly means so much!! And I'll keep working hard on Arc 5.2 of the main game!!

Carrot, out.

They went to Denny's.