This is the chapter card for one of the DLC Step 1 Moments! It’s a Halloween event 🍭. I’m very close to finishing the script.
Our Life: Now & Forever is a nostalgic Visual Novel where you create your own character and grow from childhood to adulthood with your two closest neighbors. It’s currently in development by GB Patch Games.
The fourth Moment that’s been written is called “Hide & Seek”. That’s where you’ll get to meet the last Step 1 character, and what a precious little boy he is 🥰
Our Life: Now & Forever is a nostalgic Visual Novel where you create your own character and grow from childhood to adulthood with your two closest neighbors. It’s currently in development by GB Patch Games.
[Adorable guest art by @dreamtydraw]
Welcome to 2024, everybody 🥳️
This is the year of Our Life: Now & Forever (and 2025 will be too, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves that much). After a good five odd years of making Our Life: Beginnings & Always content, it’s amazing to look ahead and see only the progress that will be done on this new game. Qiu and Tamarack are the center of the GB Patch Games universe now. But even though I’m not creating any new OL1 scenes, there may still be some exciting developments for the existing stuff. Cove hasn’t been forgotten.
💚❤️️💙
If you want to know about what will be accomplished specifically in January, you can read that HERE. Now here’s the entire year’s goals-
Honestly, 2024 is gonna be the most basic year in a very long time, haha. There’s not gonna be major launches of new DLCs, or a full game going live, or any bonus Moments. It’s simply making progress on OL: N&F. That’s pretty normal for game development. It’s just not something we’ve had to go through since 2019. But we’re hunkering down for the long haul on this one.
Specifically, Step 1 will be fully completed in 2024 and I’ll make as much headway into Step 2 as possible. There will be two updates to the public demo, one probably in May and another sometime in Fall/Third Quarter 2024. Those will focus on Step 1 scenes still. I can’t guarantee we’ll be able to rework the Step 2 part of the demo with new content this year. As it is, the content was made to be a demo preview. A lot is gonna change for the complete version.
And that’s about it for our main game. I appreciate all of you who decide to follow along with the process.
Beyond that, the Our Life: Beginnings & Always digital artbook is going to become available through Steam and Itch.io in early 2024! Maybe not January, but ideally no later than February.
Finger’s crossed, we will also launch Our Life: Beginnings & Always for Mac on Steam and make it available for Androids through the Google Playstore. I can’t state it with confidence, since there’s constantly been roadblocks/issues with those, aha.
My final little note for this coming year is that, potentially, there could be more information coming out about the game that’s going into production after OL2, “Project W”.
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And that’s what you can look forward to. Every year I’m amazed I can continue to do this as my fulltime job. I’m always wondering when that will end, but I’d be lying if I said I could see that point. The support GB Patch Games has gotten, and still gets each day, is more than enough to for it to continue for the rest of OL2’s development.
I’m pretty confident in assuming that when that game does launch it’s going to be successful enough for Project W to go into full production. It’s a truly wonderful thing. Thank you so much for being here. We’ll do our best with the time and attention you’ve given us.
Happy New Year 🥰️
Tamarack gets specially dressed up one day and invites you over for a tea party 🥹. She takes this very seriously
Our Life: Now & Forever is a nostalgic Visual Novel where you create your own character and grow from childhood to adulthood with your two closest neighbors. It’s currently in development by GB Patch Games.
The MC sure can have a lot of attitude, haha.
Our Life: Now & Forever is a nostalgic Visual Novel where you create your own character and grow from childhood to adulthood with your two closest neighbors. It’s currently in development by GB Patch Games.
Oh 😟. There’s plenty of good times in Our Life: Now & Forever and hanging out at the dance hall can be a lot of fun, but having a hobby with gendered roles isn’t ideal for a kid like Qiu. That does come up in the story.
Our Life: Now & Forever is a nostalgic Visual Novel where you create your own character and grow from childhood to adulthood with your two closest neighbors. It’s currently in development by GB Patch Games.
Hi, love your games so much <3
Sorry if this is rude to ask, but do you know when OL1 dlc would be going on Steam sale? I'd like to support you financially and play more of the game, but ngl would like to save up even 1$ bc of how life is rn
Again sorry if this is rude to ask, I'm not sure how steam sales work in relation to the developers x-x
That’s alright! I’m obsessed with the creation part of game making, but it is a struggle for me to do the other parts of running a game dev company. Most of the time I just forget important dates and never put our stuff on sale when it’d make sense, then don’t do it randomly either.
I am sorry since I know people are waiting for those, so you’re welcome to remind me! Our games are on sale. And I mean right now, I just put the discounts in. The Winter Sales on Steam and Itch.io have started and everybody can get OL extras and/or our older games at a discount starting today then going forward for the next couple weeks :D
It’s great you enjoy our work!
Our Life: Now & Forever got a Patreon beta update! It includes Part 1 of a brand new Moment- Fancy Fun 💖
Our Life: Now & Forever is a nostalgic Visual Novel where you create your own character and grow from childhood to adulthood with your two closest neighbors. It’s currently in development by GB Patch Games.
hello!
just dipping in to say: thanks so, so much for this game. it's rare that i get to see chinese americans in dating sims, and even less often are they as charismatic and fleshed-out as Qiu. being able to interact with someone who acts like a real person, who looks the same as i do and isn't reduced to a cripplingly shy, bookish type, who can be as funny and as terse as the asians i know in real life, has been kind of crazy for me.
the amount of parallels my life has to the game is insane. nothing else i've played has captured what it felt like for me to grow up, suburban and queer and Chinese American, as well as this game's sliver of demo managed. the amount of projection i've done on the story is straight up unhealthy.
even in the limited amount i've played through, there's been so much that i've been surprised by. changing what i call my mom so something custom, being able to set my ethnicity, having it acknowledge Qiu if you put in "Chinese" -- when I saw that the expanded demo let you mention you knew what 秋 meant in the prologue, i punched the air in Real Life with my Real Hands. i know the MC has to be very General American in order to represent the player base fairly, but even these minor details are more than a lot of VNs give.
i just wanted to say that the choices you guys made, regarding the cultures of the MC and LIs, really hit home (with a sledgehammer) in a place that mattered (into the solar plexus.)
I’m really sorry for such a late reply! This was a lovely ask. Thank so much for the kind words and super cute sketch. It’s wonderful seeing that Qiu felt like a relatable person. We definitely hoped they would make people happy, seeing that was the case really brightened my day.
We’ll keep doing our best with what’s coming next and are gonna include more nods to the MC’s identity and Qiu’s as well 😄
this is so embarrassing im so sorry help, but im curious. What are everett's honest feelings for the mc during his route like his character confused me whether he actually liked/(love????) her HELP
He likes her as much as a ridiculous high schooler with issues can seriously like his girlfriend, aha. He is honestly into JB but is also very self-absorbed. Still, if get them into a relationship they will stay together even after they graduate.
Hi hi! I don't know if you can answer this but something I was curious about. If you have Golden hair Qiu comments on it but not if you have golden eyes as well, is that going to stay the same or will they always stay focused on the hair?
Qiu will always only point to one thing. It’d be kinda awkward to try pointing at everything on the MC that uses that color, aha. But if you don’t have gold hair, then the eyes could be noted instead.
do you know when the next olnf public update will be?
The next update will probably be early May 2024, and then it’d get updated again six or so months from then.
If one ever created a visual novel game, and some aspects or most of the game are inspired by your projects: our life. Would that be taken down as copyright? What happens if they say in the credits that the game is highly inspired by 'our life'? And the game was made for their own fun since games like these are very little. If they do make it and it is highly inspired, are they able to make a patron or Kickstarter for the game?
People are welcome to make games inspired by Our Life! You can crowdfund it and sell the completed game, too. You wouldn’t need to give OL credit, though that would be nice of you.
Either way, I don’t have ownership of the concept of growing up, or splitting a game into different time periods/separate little stories, or MC customization, or any of the features in OL. As long as you’re not literally using our characters/setting/assets or pretending it is part of the OL series, it’s cool. I hope you have fun if you make a VN!
Will it be possible to make Qiu or tamarack confess to us, like with cove? If possible will they and her also confess at the end of step 3 or could it be earlier?
They will have confession scenes, but I can’t give any details on when!
Hi how are you? I heard that you guys were doing something about the currency changes in Argentina (I know you didn’t change it off, just that you were doing something about it), but I’m not entirely sure nor understand what that is?
Could you explain it? Thanks!
I don’t know either, honestly. We just changed the amount it cost to get the OL DLCs in the Argentina Peso and Turkish Lira, and added prices for the new LATAM-USD region and MENA-USD region because of Steam requirements. We made the tweaks according to their default price suggestions. I hope it’s an improvement and that people in those regions can get the DLCs if they want to, but I can’t say Steam’s thought process behind the new requirements.
