BARS Progress and EBJB Games' Future

Hey everyone. Yes, another statement in July, but not just about BARS as there's not much to say that hasn't been said already, aside from the inmate NPC AI system being finished more or less, and there are still no plans to delay the game.

In a statement published on New Year's Day, we mentioned that we had planned to purchase a computer powered by Apple Silicon later in the year (for reasons unrelated to EBJB Games), potentially allowing us to port existing and future titles to macOS and officially support the platform, however plans have changed as of this month and a new Windows machine was purchased instead. This means there are no longer any plans to officially port games to macOS for the foreseeable future.

We had thought of porting games to Linux, but have now decided against it as there is no demand for Linux ports, and we've got data to back this decision up:

As of writing, Five Faizul Fridays DX is our most popular and most downloaded title ever, making up 25.9% of our total lifetime downloads, 12.2% in its first day. Being the most popular, most downloaded, and fastest growing title of our entire library with just a Windows port proves to us that there is no strong demand for us to provide ports to other platforms, so we will continue to develop for Windows, and potentially release ARM64 builds if Windows on ARM becomes mainstream, though x86_64 processors still dominate the Windows PC market share so this is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

To further support this decision, our YouTube analytics also show how many of our viewers run certain operating systems. The stats show that in our channel's lifetime, 55.8% of viewers were on Windows and 34.2% were on Android, compared to just 8.3% on iOS, 0.9% on macOS, 0.2% on Chrome OS and Linux, and 0.1% on Nintendo Switch. In the last 18 months, 61% were on Windows, 29% were on Android, 8.3% were on iOS, 1% were on macOS, 0.19% were on Chrome OS and Nintendo Switch, and 0% were on Linux.

Our Chrome OS userbase has always been very small, but the reason we continued to support Chrome OS until our engine switch was to allow players on other platforms like macOS to also play our games. Web ports on the new engine don't work the same, so we aren't able to do the same for Five Faizul Fridays DX or any future games. We may however, every once in a while, release something for Android, like we did with Dead End Targets. Depending how development goes, BARS may get an Android port if there is enough demand, though the experience will likely not be as enjoyable as it would be on PC, or as Dead End Targets is on Android, as it would have to remain at a fixed aspect ratio resulting in black bars on the sides of the screen. If this isn't an issue for you and you really want a mobile port of BARS, we may consider it but we cannot promise anything.

For the next few years, we're going to be much busier and we won't have much time at all to work on games. So after BARS we will be taking a break indefinitely, not just because of this, but because we have been working pretty much non-stop on games since the development of Five Faizul Fridays began in September of 2023, almost three years ago.

The graph above shows the development duration for every title we have published to date, excluding BARS which has not yet been published.

As you can see, we have not taken any significant breaks since mid 2023. After publishing Pigeon Puller, we took a break of about four months before starting work on Five Faizul Fridays (releasing Resizer as a demo the very next day). Development of Dead End began a week before we released Five Faizul Fridays, development on Dead End: The Fugitive happened mostly alongside Dead End, and Dead End: The Lionfield Cure began development two days before the release of Dead End. The only time we had in between projects was after Dead End: The Lionfield Cure, where we spent a week deciding what our next project would be. The graph shows a large gap between Five Faizul Fridays DX, but this graph doesn't take into account updates, and Five Faizul Fridays DX had six published builds before BARS began development, with six released afterwards.

Our decision to stop updating Five Faizul Fridays DX was partly because the game no longer had any major issues which needed fixing, and finally putting an end to the project would allow us to spend what very little time we've got left into completing as much work on BARS as we can until September, where by then we'll hopefully have most if not all major systems implemented. Once BARS is out, hopefully on the same day as we currently have planned, it may receive future updates like bug fixes or perhaps new items, jobs, or escape methods, but updates will not be as frequent, as our main focus will unfortunately no longer be on EBJB Games. We will of course stay somewhat active on our socials but don't expect yearly releases from now on, at least not for large projects. We love developing games and wish we could release games all the time, but so much of our free time is now being spent on game development that we aren't leaving any time to take care of ourselves and just live life a bit more. You can't make great games if you don't take care of yourself first.