2023 was in many ways a challenging year for us. Some reasons may be obvious - the post-Covid economy which has been hitting creative industries hard for the past year, as people have less disposable income, others less so, and though I have hinted at some developments in a past livestream, I promised to go into more detail though I find it a heavy subject to write about.
During the early Covid years, we were lucky enough to enjoy a large influx of new players, thanks to both people staying at home more, and us giving away millions of free games in a stay-at-home campaign. We invested the increased sales into hiring more developers so we can put in more work for you - the team currently has 5 developers working on 100% Orange Juice alone, in addition to artists, translators, QA and other support staff.
A specific goal in this recruitment drive was to be able to work on a certain project simultaneously with the ongoing 100% Orange Juice development.
For many years, people have been asking, "when will 100% Orange Juice be ported to Switch? Will it be available on mobile?"
The answer to that question has been that the engine made it rather impossible to port the game to other platforms. But in fact, we've been secretly working on a full remake of 100% Orange Juice in a new engine since 2018, with the goal of both modernizing the internal architecture and visuals of the game, and being able to release it on other platforms as well. The project restarted once on the way after staff changes, but the latest version was getting far enough that at the start of 2023 we temporarily assigned most of our developer team on it in the hopes that we could boost it to completion before the lower dev time spent on the live version of 100% Orange Juice becomes an issue (working on a remake of a game that's also getting constant changes at the same time isn't the most efficient way to develop something, after all).
It was supposed to be a fun surprise when we can reveal it to everyone (which we were planning to do soon). Then something happened.
You may have noticed I avoided mentioning the name of the engine we were developing the remake in, and some of you might've already guessed where this is going from that.
Yes, we were porting 100% Orange Juice to Unity.
From the beginning this came with some caveats, as the development cycle for the Unity engine has always had some issues, but it also had the best terms of use, and was determined to overall make development much easier once the remake is finished.
Then in September 2023, Unity announced their "controversial" new pricing model, which would've completely annihilated us as it was originally laid out. Shocked, we instantly froze work on the Unity version while waiting on more news to come out. While Unity eventually walked back the worst details of that decision, all the info that came out as a consequence coupled with the way they rolled out that change out of the blue in the first place had already done the damage. With our port approaching the halfway point to completion, we could either continue working on the Unity port full power for another 2 years, hoping things don't get worse, or we could cut our losses and kill the project. Given the status of the project and our loss of faith in the engine for the game that's basically keeping the food on the table, we chose the latter with heavy hearts.
That doesn't mean we're giving up on porting the game to other platforms, but we don't have the resources to start a new full port from the scratch. Instead we're now looking at steadily replacing the old modules of the live version of 100% Orange Juice to eventually make it compatible with more hardware and other platforms. What it does mean, though, is that all the time and money spent on the Unity version over... 6 years was more or less entirely wasted, apart from the experience gained from it.
Due to the aforementioned dev reallocation, 2023 was a slow year for new content in 100% Orange Juice. At the same time, with the economy at large returning to normal, 2023 saw an overall drop in sales, leaving us with a bigger development team, less sales, and at the same time people understandably complaining about a lack of new content.
Sometimes stars just don't align the way you want them to.
I want to emphasize that this doesn't mean we're going to have layoffs, or that we're stopping work on our games, or anything like that. This post isn't about that. While 2023 left us in the red, we're dealing with it in other ways as best we can. In fact, this Patreon is one of those ways - we're seeking alternative revenue streams to help support our ongoing development work.
As of late 2023, all of our 100% Orange Juice developers are back working on the live version, and while we had a lot of backlogged content to wrap up (such as the Bounty Hunt rework), you can expect a lot more in 2024 - the 10 year anniversary of 100% Orange Juice on Steam! There are a ton of things we've wanted to do but figured out make more sense in the Unity version, which has become almost an internal meme at this point. Now we will be focusing on gradually implementing those in the live version.
If the Patreon doesn't take off, or ends up being more trouble to maintain than it's worth, it may end up short lived, but I figured it's worth a try.
So what will you actually get in return for supporting us on Patreon? Not much, really, and we don't recommend you do it if your finances are tight. We will be posting random stuff from behind the scenes irregularly relating to whatever we're working on - some disaster screenshots from things gone wrong in development, ramblings by developers, and possibly teasers for new content. For those curious, I've attached a small gameplay video from an earlier Unity build on the page. There might be more stuff like that. The last thing we want is for people feel they need to sign up on Patreon for exclusive in-game content, so that's not going to happen.
If we get good ideas, we might add more tiers later, but for now there's just a single $5/month support tier that will give you access to all of our posts.
Thank you for reading this far, and thank you for your support over the years.
- Jakke Elonen
President of Fruitbat Factory
Fruitbat Factory Patreon Page:
https://www.patreon.com/FruitbatFactoryDevelops