2024 is over! What did the Grow a Girlfriend team accomplish?

"Nobody told me when you make a video game you have to make the whole thing."

When I first promised to release an expanded version of Grow a Girlfriend (GaG) in mid 2024, I underestimated how much work goes into a making a game a "full game". I did anticipated that what awaited me was a year of coding minigames and moving skies, designing and redesigning bedrooms, characters and UIs, learning to paint backgrounds in proper perspective, drawing tons of CGs, and continually rewriting stories!

However now it's coming to a close. Here is the current state of the game and the steps left to take!

Art

Almost everything has changed, but here are the exciting ones:

There are now 20 locations (many with day/night variations). One of the challenges with drawing backgrounds is that each girl has her own date location art style, indicative of how she views the world! Additionally, there are 12 new exciting/provocative/horrific CGs, 4 new side characters, and the bedroom was completely redesigned with more detail and has states! Only a handful of CGs and backgrounds of those are left for me to finalise.

There is a 2nd variation to the below image ;)

Story

The biggest struggle we faced through this process was making sure the new girls were distinct enough from Button while remaining interesting and presenting the opportunity to experience a fulfilling and good narrative along with them. There was a lot of writing, thinking, and re-writing involved. Now that the main story is done, the only parts left to complete are the very ends of certain routes, as well as continuing to polish the dialogue and make sure it is as true to the characters and our design as they can be.

Music

It is a great asset to be able to have original music in our game, and the new girls will have unique soundtracks to accompany them through their adventures. Many new tracks have been made, and there is still much to do, but our composer is hard at work creating the best tunes.

Marketing

Probably the biggest hurdle in the fast progress I envisioned was the daunting problem of MARKETING. Proper marketing is crucial for the success of a small indie project such as GaG and I did not foresee how much planning and consideration would have to be done. We are currently having a trailer made for the game that we can use for the marketing. Once the trailer is finished, we will be launching our Steam page, which will be the other major market where we will be selling GaG along with itch.

Once the Steam page is up, I would like to earnestly ask every GaG fan to please Wishlist the game on Steam! Even if you plan on buying the game already, or if you plan on buying it on itch, Steam wishlists are a very important tool to insure that new game releases are displayed on the front page of the store when they come out.

Bugs and fixes

I devoted lot of dev time to resolving new bugs arising from new gameplay, minigames, and UI changes to the menus. I also fixed old bugs present from the original release of the game that we only noticed after launch, and implemented new settings, including a trigger warning system anyone can enable for explicit scene warnings.

Can you guess what this minigame is? It took a while to learn to get the drawers and fridge to open and close properly and to make the items interact.

Release Date?

Currently everything is proceeding smoothly and well, even if the whole process has been longer than I expected. Depending on when the trailer will be ready, we hope to have the Steam page up and running within the coming weeks, and after a cycle of marketing to which we are satisfied, we hope to release the game within a couple of months.

Thank you to all who have been so patient through the process of this game's development! I realise things have been a quiet here on itch, but I have been posting updates over the whole development period on my social media, especially bimonthly on my Patreon page. I encourage anybody who would like to follow the development of the game more closely to follow on those platforms. I also appreciate the support of all of my patrons since they help me to continue focusing on the development of this game as my primary occupation at this moment. If you would like to follow or support me, I will link all relevant sites in my linktree at the bottom of this post.

I hope that you are all looking forward to Growing more Girlfriends this year! All of my social media and support platforms!