Discussing 100% Orange Juice on New Platforms

Hey everyone, having a nice day!?

We have good news! As a fruit of our continued effort into improving the existing game codebase that started some years ago...

Drums please!!!!!!!

100% Orange Juice is free from direct shackles to Steam and now compiles and runs successfully on other platforms, for now tested on Android with success!

This means release tomorrow, right? (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧?

Unhappily no (～￣▽￣)～

We have some obstacles that need to be cleared first and would love your opinions on it, since it's important bits regarding the future of such a release!

The first one is: Voices

As you know, we pride ourselves on having a lot of work done on voice work; we have almost a hundred characters voiced. It's a lot! But those voices were licensed for computer use, not other platforms, and it's currently unknown how much work, and money, would go into expanding the licensing. It's not like we won't try, but this is the kind of situation in which we cannot fathom to give you any guarantees.

We have basically two options until this ordeal is sorted:

Silence: The game wouldn't have voices at all

Computer-Generated Voice-like Sounds (NOT AI): Think about Animal Crossing, basically something similar to it, sounds that would take the dialogue text and generate something that sounds natural for that text. But synthesized, unintelligible voices.

The second one is: Multiplayer

As we stated before, for 100% Orange Juice to be on other platforms, we need multiplayer code to back it. That's generally easy, but for everyone to have the best chances to play together, we need a centralized control for that. One option would be having our own servers, but it involves so many hurdles beyond the technical realm, we don't really consider it viable. The best option we have (as we have answered in a developer stream in the past) is the Epic Online Services. It allows PC, mobile, and consoles to play together, allows us to reuse basically the same code, and completely skips the need for a server. We currently plan for the following:

Steam users would have the option to play with themselves (via Steam infrastructure) or with everyone (via EOS, which would basically use Epic's services to connect them to all other platforms).

Other platforms would use EOS exclusively to play between themselves and with everyone.

A reminder that you don't need an Epic Account to play online with Epic Online Services, so users wouldn't need to create or connect basically anything, even on Steam

We are asking you because the whole internet has an animosity (sometimes justified) against anything related to Epic. We don't think you guys will have strong opinions on it, but we are open to hearing your opinions if you have any on the subject.

Leave your comments, or join our Discord server and tell us about it on ⁠#lobby or ⁠#juices!

A reminder that we do not have a date nor confirmation for the Android or any other platform release yet; we ask you guys to trust us and wait, as we are doing our best given all the present circumstances. Android is just the simplest way to test the workability of our code, and that's why we named it (the alternative would be being vague, and vagueness isn't good)

But dreams are free, and following our dreams is what got us so far, so if you have any opinion on theoretical platform releases, like "I would like X to be controlled in Y way in Z platform" or anything that may, up to this point, have belonged to your wildest dreams, let us know! A reminder that of the options we have, they all are modern and active platforms, so unhappily we won't be able to release on Dreamcast so your pets can appear on the VMU, ok? (≧∀≦)ゞ