We’re looking for new Ren’py programmers to join our studio! Our team is currently working on a slice-of-life visual novel called Our Life: Now & Forever, and we are bringing on at least one new programmer to help complete the game.
If you’re a Ren’py programmer looking for a new role, we’d love to have you apply.
If you told me to paint you a picture of small town Oregon, it would look exactly like this 🥰
(Except not nearly as good because I do our community management and not our backgrounds.)
Nevertheless: Take a gander at Main Street during sunset! It couldn’t get more dreamy.
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.
can i ask you to expand on some of the personality traits a bit more? specifically rowdy/proper and rule breaker/follower.
what's the difference between them? i can see that someone can be boisterous but also follow rules, but im curious to how the game will differentiate proper and rule follower. like, how would a proper/rule-breaker kid differ from a rowdy/rule-breaker kid?
A rule-breaker is very literal. It only comes up in situations that are about breaking a rule with Opal or the school or general social rules or even actually breaking a law. Proper and rowdy is about how MC speaks and physically reacts. MC can use very polite phrasing/gestures but be willing to sneak out of the house or something.
hihii GB and GB team! I hope you are all doing well and taking care of yourselves 💕 First, I wanted to express how deeply important both of the OL games have been to experience! It's such a surreal feeling to recreate moments of childhood nostalgia in a space that feels safe, even if it's only fictional. So thank you for giving people a space to heal the little version of themselves through your wonderful games 😊💕 The characters, the music, the world building and art- all of it is impeccable and I truly can not wait to play OL2.
Secondly, I wanted to ask a bit of a self indulgent question if that is okay. As I am eagerly awaiting more content for OL2, I haven't been able to stop thinking of your beautiful Qiu Lin! Ah, if I haven't both wanted to be a character and date them more in my life... I wanted to know if it's possible to be able to kiss either of the leads from OL:NF at any point during step two, similarly to how you can confess to/kiss Cove in OL1 near the end of step two.
I completely understand if you can't answer that. Regardless, I hope I didn't talk too much and I can't wait to see what everyone has in store of OL:NF! 🥰
Best wishes to you all! 💕
I’m so glad you’ve had a good experience with the games! There will be chances to give Qiu and/or Tamarack a kiss in Step 2. But I can’t share any details on when or how.
OH!! So I was right!! I actually want to say that Pran felt familiar to me when I first saw him and then I realize he remind me of Amir! But I don't want to assume 😅💦 so YEAAY!! ✨✨
Also no wonder Jeremy feels so loved! I can feel how you love him a lot from playing your game! 💞
Thank you for sharing the story! I understand a lot that it's hard to choose favorite and of course nostalgia will win in people's heart most of the time! (Also Nami is a very cool lady I understand, very good taste 🤭)
I can relate to the experience especially the part where you're waiting for your older sister! Growing up I too play many games with my sister so we do that too! (I hope this isn't too TMI 💦)
It's okay if you're not answering this if the ask session already over, I just have one last question (for now I guess) will you make a game like Harvest Moon in the future sometimes? Like dating sims but with farming too? Or no?
Thank you for answering all of my question! Have a nice day/night!! ✨✨
[This is related to an ask from last month’s Q&A day]
Haha, that’s okay. It’s really nice that you can relate! I don’t have any plans to make a farming sim game. I lack the experience to lead such a gameplay focused project. But if my skills ever improved and we had the budget, my most unrealistic game development dream would be making a life sim game set in the same world as Project W.
Or if someone else was developing a farming sim and they wanted to bring me on purely as a writer and not the game lead, that’d also be cool.
for the jealousy mechanic, will Tamarack and Qiu only get jealous if you interact with the other LI or will they just get jealous in general over things unrelated to the other LI?
Almost always they get jealous towards the other lead. But that is because the side characters rarely do things that would make the leads want to be jealous and the side characters aren’t even around that much. Qiu and Tamarack don’t see the side characters as competition nearly as much as they do for each other.
Did Elizabeth succeed in becoming an architect?
Yes! Dreams come true in OLBA, haha.
Sorry, if you answered this question already, but do you have general idea or concepts for all the moments for in Step 3, planned already? If so, do you plan on making a school dance/homecoming moment, or something equivalent?
Thank you to you and your team. I can’t wait to play the final product. Have a great day.
I have a list of extremely vague concepts that I want to include based on their ages, the place they live in, and the autumnal-ness of the game. But I’ll still need to do a ton of work to get the entire set of Step 3 Moments finalized. I am intending for there to be some kind of formal event!
Hey there! I love your work, I can't wait for Our Life: Forever and Always! Your VNs raised the bar for me, so as someone who dabbled a little in coding and game design, I want to ask: How do you go about writing the script? I'm always amazed at the sheer number of variables you must have to keep track of!
Hope you have a nice day!
I always start by creating a “draft”. For me, that’s writing down an explanation to myself of every scene, choice, and alteration in a Moment. Drafts are pretty detailed, they’re around half as long as the script that comes out of the draft. I need to have a super clear guideline to work off of in order to write a proper script. The worst times are when I was too vague in my draft or I decide I need additional choices/alterations and have to plan that out as I’m writing.
There’s no list of everything that’s happened in the game and every choice, I’d find that more overwhelming. So, I just have to remember everything. Usually when I’m working on a new scene, if there is an existing scene/choice that’d be relevant it jumps into my mind. I can also have a second chance to consider everything when writing the script. I’m afraid I can’t give advice on how to organize lots of character/story details in a text format, aha. But I hope you have fun with your own coding/game design!
will other character's acknowledge how quiet the mc is? I've always been interested in playing a mc that's partially nonverbal
Characters are aware that MC doesn’t talk much or at all, if that’s the case. They sometimes bring it up, but usually the characters just do things to avoid forcing MC to talk in order to accommodate them.
i was wondering since it says the full steam integration wont be until step 4 in the roadmap, so if we play step 1-3 we wont get achievements on steam?
There should be achievements for the first two Steps initially and then Step 3 when that comes out! Full integration means all the optional Steam features being applied for the full game.
Hi :D i hope this doesn't sound too blunt, I'm just wondering about this.
Since it takes 2 months to fully complete one moment wouldn't there only be 7 completed moments by the time of the November update this year?
Again sorry if this sounds rude, I just hope you don't feel pressured into to finishing quickly as possible. Take all the time you need and take care of yourself.
Sorry for bad English.
That’s about to change! We’re in the process of hiring new programmers. Once they get on board and start working we’ll more than double the typical monthly output.
A lot of scripts had to be finished for multiple people to be programming different Moments at once, but we’ve reached that point. Step 2 is almost fully written right now.
Will we still get to see ol2 step 4 sprites sometime this year?
Maybe. There’s a few pieces left for Step 2 and then there is gonna be new Step 3 outfits/Step 3 CGs. Perhaps at the end of year some Step 4 assets could be started, but it might be an early next year thing.
so sorry if this has been answered before but would there be some fun scenes if the MC happen to share given names with existing characters or have the same nickname as them?
No, sorry. There’s a lot of characters, multiple time periods, and OL2 has the option to change your name and use nicknames. There’d have to be so many alterations for every character to acknowledge that MC has the same name or their nickname was their name. And then other characters would also have to react to MC having the same name as someone else. If there’s two Tamaracks going around or something, the game just has to let that go, aha.
Not sure if this has already been asked, but will there be an argument like in B&A in N&F?
Yeah. OLNF has a lot more arguments than OLBA did, haha.
In olba, are there any ways to propose to Cove or get Cove to propose to you w/out any dlc's?
Yeah! You can propose and Cove can propose in Step 4 without DLCs. The only DLC exclusive proposal is MC proposing at the end of Step 3, which does require seeing a certain DLC Moment.
