If you are reading this, chances are - You know about Will You Snail? I personally love this game, so a bit over a week after the game release, when I saw someone (RestingMax) try to make a WYS Friday Night Funkin’ mod, I knew I wanted to assist.

Since then I have sort of taken the role of a director, even though in the team we have a “flat” hierarchy (no one is really in charge of stuff, but I am the one assigning the tasks and checking progress, as well as coding the mod). And, the last time you all have heard proper news was maybe half a year ago.

That’s why this exists! But first, let’s go over what happened.

“Development hell”

Truth is, we didn’t get a lot of progress done until about the start of 2023.

The main issue is the lack of artists (which we are still experiencing). We currenly have:

  • A charter (RayNheartZ)
  • A coder (me, x8c8r)
  • A musician (RojLul)
  • An artist (WindsweptWonder)
  • A concept artist (RestingMax)

The entire team consists of just 5 people, we had some other people join us before, but they all ended up getting kicked due to not making any progress whatsoever.

The 2023 revival

Somewhere near start of 2023 I started to actually code the mod. And, we all decided to keep the mod’s development in a bit of a secret. I think no one knew that we were still working on this, and in fact, I have seen someone try to start their own mod (it was before 2023, and I think they failed due to complete lack of organization).

Anyways, we kept working on the thing, and the original goal was to showcase something by the 1 year anniversary (Today), but the plan ultimately… It didn’t fail, but as you can tell it didn’t really succeed either. Due to Wonder not making sprites in time, deadline coming near and me wanting to showcase at least something I decided to write this post.

So, what do we have done anyways?

Actually, quite a few things.

  • RojLul made 6 songs, all of which were charted (You can hear one of them here -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVs_2Q8uH1k)
  • I coded a pretty faithful recreation of the game’s pause menu and a subtitle system, also I made some major changes to the hud (You can read more in the “Progress breakdown” section).
  • RestingMax drew a lot of concept art, like A LOT of it

Progress breakdown

Hud

The hud has a lot of hidden parts that you can toggle (e.g. the score, misses, accuracy, e.t.c.) as well as changing default healthbar to… Vertical!

With subtitles came a problem: they are covering the healthbar, and while that problem got fixed later, a pretty good solution turned out to turn the healthbar 90 degrees, so it’s vertical.

About subtitles: They look pretty much identical to the main game. Some songs have Squid voicelines, and adding subtitles to complement these was a no-brainer. It took some major bug fixing, but in the end, they work perfectly even with texts of absurd lengths.

As I said before, I made a pretty faithful recreation of the pause menu, and also I quickly slapped together a Freeplay menu “reskin”.

Songs

The songs are really cool, they were all made by Roj, he used a chromatic made by Maffaka, who was really nice to provide it when I asked him.

Engine

The mod uses modified Forever Engine Legacy. I have made some changes to it, which are not that interesting to cover here. But I do want to mention that I tried to add HScript support to it (and failed miserably).

The Future

The mod is still nowhere ready for a full release, the menus are unfinished, the sprites are non-existant, despite all of that we are still gonna keep working on it, and hopefully it will see light of day at some point. The story mode will prob take a few iterations, because just doing regular weeks is lame for this type of mod.

From now on, though, as the thing is no longer a secret, we can hopefully share more stuff with you all.

If you are an artist and you have worked on FNF’ mods before, you are welcome to DM me ;) (x8c8r#2454)