Bundle of Joy turns 1 on March 25th, 2026!
It's been an incredible year for BoJ, with showcases across the US, international press recognition, and very thoughtful user reviews. To help celebrate the year, I'm releasing a v1.2 update, which includes some updates to the narrative formatting, grammatical updates that reflect your partner's gender, and some additional minor updates based on a couple of bug reports I got in the past 2-3 months. I haven't been actively maintaining the game since the end of last year, but I thought it was high time I pushed some of these updates!
Above is the admitted sloppy code I appended to the ink story module using the inkgd plugin, but I think this hacky way of addressing the M's gender in the dialog is perfectly fine. In an upcoming project, I'll standardize this type of variable handling a bit better, but I thought it was a funny image to include in this update.
As part of this update, I wanted to officially say that I've removed the BoJ demo from the Steam page. I think it was well past time to bring that down, but I never really had the heart to do so until now. I wrote about the rationale for this a bit in a recent blog post if you're interested in hearing more. Something I didn't write over there that I should highlight here is that over 3000 people downloaded the demo, which is incredible! Now, not everyone who downloaded the demo played it (yet!) so I'm sure there might be a bit of confusion when folks try to open the demo, and it won't launch. But, hopefully, they'll reach out to me, and I can encourage them to play the full game.
The last big news is that part of the anniversary celebration (and this is just purely by coincidence!) is that the game will be 50% off as part of the Steam Spring Sale (March 19th-26th). This is the biggest discount for the game to date, so if you haven't had a chance to check it out or downloaded the demo but didn't get a chance to play before it was taken down, then get it this week!
Otherwise, I'll still be monitoring any bug reports and/or reviews to address issues with the game and will be maintaining it a bit more as I'm transitioning to my next project (go check out that blog post for some details!).
Lastly, I'll be at PAX EAST next week if you happen to be in Boston and want to talk narrative games, technical narrative design, Godot development, or... anything! Feel free to send me a message, reply to this post, or reach out on Discord. Also, if you haven't subscribed to the Essay Games newsletter, that'll be a more reliable and consistent way of keeping in touch with what I'm working on.