Pride, Piss Boys and Bittersweet Goodbyes // June Future Friends Newsletter!
So many things to discuss! Fish! Friends!! Tortoises???
Oh hi there,
Three months running, it seems this newsletter thing might actually stick! As it’s pride month, we’ve decided to make this our campest edition yet 💅 It shouldn’t be hard for us here at FF as most of us are 🌈 and even the straight ones go all the way to Barcelona to watch Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli xcx perform (Thomas we’re looking at you 🫵).
🪸🐠 Fish are what? (Future) Friends, not food! 🐠🪸
Our idle sim game, Tiny Aquarium: Social Fishkeeping, launched on Steam LAST WEEK and we are very happy about it!!! Tiny Aquarium is a social idle simulator that keeps growing, even when offline. Hatch, sell fish, decorate, go fishin’, and visit your friends’ aquariums with bite-sized daily sessions.
What is ‘Social Fishkeeping’ I hear you cry out? Well, in Tiny Aquarium you can visit your bestie’s tanks to admire their decor skills and judge what they’ve named their aquatic pals. There’s also an online market where you can trade your fish with fellow fans around the world! Did we mention there’s also a fishing mini-game?! Every great game has one. It’s a fact.
The team here refuses to let their real life pet fish trauma (don’t ask about the dish towel incident…) stop them from creating the tank of their dreams. Having a happy aquarium live at the bottom of our screen while we pretend to do real work has been wonderful. 10/10 would recommend.
Start your own piss boy legacy now! Build your dream aquatic space, breed and sell fish and connect with friends to see what they’ve created!
Future Friends Roundup!
On the guestlist today - We got the HOTTEST invites to some fire events this month:
💜 Wholesome Direct: We announced NEW MULTIPLAYER GOURDLETS TOGETHER! We launched Gourdlets last year, and this sequel is bigger and better with multiplayer and fishing! Imagine Club Penguin except there’s no penguins and you are, instead, a gourd…
Sign up to the
for all of AuntyGames’ game dev news!P.S: have we ever mentioned the dev is a literal rocket scientist?!
🧡Women-led Games: We fully revealed this new gem, On-Together in Women-Led Games Showcase: Summer Game Fest Edition! On-Together is a social chatroom game to work, play games and hang out with your friends. We’ve also started holding our work meetings in On-Together so we can confirm it’s the literal cutest.
💙PC Gaming Show: We announced CloverPit will be LAUNCHING THIS SUMMER in the PC Gaming Show! We also reached half a million demo downloads AND a fan made a fully playable version of our game in GOOGLE SHEETS??? 🤯 What!?!
Farewell to our Nat 💖
On a bittersweet note, last week we said goodbye to one of our sweetest friends, as she’s moving on to do some very cool and exciting things!!! We are so proud and so happy for her!
Natalie had been with us for a long time and had done SO MUCH within the PR, marketing and publishing side of the business. We couldn’t let her leave before asking her the most important questions in an attempt to distract her enough and delay her leaving us 💔 It didn’t work BUT you can read our short interview below:
Sweet Nat <3 Let’s ignore the horrors of the world and celebrate this exciting time for you! Where are you off to, and where can people find you to follow you on your new adventures?
My sweet Laura C and Future Friends <3 I’m really sad to be leaving, but I’m also so excited about where I’m going. I’ll be a Community Manager at Black Tabby Games and Community/Social Media Manager and Writer at Sunset Visitor! Slay the Princess and 1000xRESIST have influenced me so much as a creative; they’re two of my top ten games of all time. I’ve been playing Scarlet Hollow since I got the job offer and it’s the most impressive visual novel I’ve ever played, and I’ve been playing games of that genre since I was, like, 12 (I’m 28 now lol). In short: I’ll get to market three of my favorite games of all time and write on the next game from one of my favorite studios… it’s basically a dream come true!
You can find me posting about games, my fictional wives, the state of the world, and other things over on my socials!
What’s your fav Future Friends memory? Don’t worry, HR isn’t reading this…
Bahaha, I honestly have a hard time picking one. Every day since I’ve been here has either been a good day or a bad day immensely improved by my fellow Future Friends. But if I had to pick, it’d be the first time I met everyone in Brighton when we flew in for the Develop conference. Seeing all of you in person in my favorite city is a time I’ll never forget. As the only American Future Friend, I always wanted any opportunity I could get to be figuratively closer to you all. Everyone has treated me so wonderfully, so when the time came that I finally met you all in person, it felt so special. Thank you for taking care of me and making sure I felt like I belonged.
This is the piece of lore checkpoint. Hand over one Nat lore please 🫵
I love Yennefer of Vengerberg from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt so much that I named my cat after her. She is five years old, a beautiful black cat with eyes that are either green or yellow depending on the day. She’s extremely talkative and stingy with overt affection, and I love her very much. She didn’t interrupt my Future Friend calls anywhere as much as our doggo, an adorable Shih Tzu named Kento who snores like a train. They are everything in our little household, here is a picture of them:
What is the one piece of life advice you would give for everyone?
Do the thing you want to do even when nobody’s looking. 9 and a half years ago, I wanted to write about video games. I suddenly woke up one day and realized that I just needed to do it. And so I did—I started by writing reviews on my little personal WordPress blog. Throughout that time, I‘ve met most of my closest friends and accomplished four dreams. I’ve studied at a great university far from home, became a managing editor at a diverse games publication with people I loved, joined the best PR agency (imo) and had a healing journey here at Future Friends, and now onto becoming a games writer. It has all stemmed from that one decision to start doing what I wanted to do. I do think luck plays a part, but in my opinion, you get lucky by working hard to be in the right room with the right people at the right time. It starts with hard work, so just work at it and the rest will come in time.
A billion year old wise worm asks you for help, do you accept?
I will help if it has money to give me in exchange. If it does not have money, I will not help. If it’s survived for billions of years, it will survive without my free help.
Where do you stand in the Mayo on Lasagne war?
NO 😭 lasagne is perfect as it is… adding anything to it only taints it!! The only thing to add to lasagne is extra cheese. There is never enough cheese.
This isn’t a question but I just wanted to say, on behalf of FFG, we miss you already <3
I miss you all already too. ;_; I came here at the tail end of the roughest period of my life. My chronic pain had reached its worst, I and my friends had been laid off from Fanbyte (rest in pieces to the best games site ever), and I felt so directionless. I can’t overstate just how hopeless I felt.
Being here healed my body, my mind, my soul. Everyone’s kindness truly transformed me. I feel so much closer to the person I want to be because I was here, with all of you. I am a kinder, brighter, and smarter person because of my time here at Future Friends. Thank you for always being so good to me. I feel so lucky to be so sad to leave a job. This isn’t a goodbye, just a “see you around.” A Future Friend is a Forever Friend to me. ❤️
Now that we’ve almost stopped crying about sweet Nat being so sweet… Let’s distract ourselves with some more Future Friends Tea!! Because we just love lore!!!
Bonus Team Lore
💛 Abi made a Tiktok about a jar of piss… The team just can’t stop with the piss. This is a very real company. We do important work. You can check out how hydrated Abi is over at this link (Watch here 👀).
💔 Laura C’s Tamagotchi died as he lived, screaming. RIP to the loudest little son, Lille Mand (Danish for ‘Little man’) 🕊️.
🐢 We have another poll for you this month. The company couple are deciding whether or not to get a tortoise possibly called Old Rosie (after the cider #NotSponsored).
🌸 Friends of Future Friends 🌸
Normally we would be oh so professional and hype up our friends here but this newsletter was already so long! We have made a special little bonus blog here for you to check out all of the cool games news from this month.
Check it out! From whacky sentient cars, cute mice, law breaking chickens, to cute scrapbooking - we’ve got it all right here ⬇️
Well, we did it piss boys! Another summer of games, another newsletter, another tiktok about bodily fluids… We hope you slayed the house down boots this month mama!
Until next time 👋
Future Friends Team
🌈