Mid-August Update (Patreon)

Halfway through August already… Can't believe April was a year ago at this point.

Progress was a bit on the slower end these past couple weeks, without anything really big to report. adi and minute are making progress on the scripting for HB: Next Exit, and the voice acting is close to finished as well. 

We're hoping to bring that scripting to 100% completion by the end of this month. adi has also been hard at work on a Highway Blossoms artbook that encompasses both the original game and Next Exit. Right now we're only planning for a digital release, but we'd love to do a physical print of it someday if there's interest… 👀

Art for Lock and Key has recently gone back into production, with a rough draft of the game's first CG being turned in just this morning! No previews today, since I'm sure it'll get its own post sometime, but it's super cute~ Rachel also finished a draft of another scene today, and the script has been cruising along nicely. Sarah will be doing LAK's soundtrack, but she's not starting work on that until after Please Be Happy's soundtrack is all done, and possibly Samayuuni's as well. We're definitely looking like we're going to have a busy 2021.

Speaking of Summer, if you missed it on Twitter, we're excited to welcome Cura to the Samayuuni squad as an additional background artist. Cura's also done the backgrounds for Episode 3 of National Park Girls, as well as the upcoming Bellhouse game "First Snow." It's not technically a screenshot, but you can see Cura's first piece for Samayuuni just below, with character art by minute and adi.

Speaking of First Snow, that releases tomorrow! The second game we've released under our Bellhouse branch, all of us are really excited for everyone to play First Snow. It's a free VN by Salty Salty Studios that we're helping to publish. It's the story of Allison Merlo, a college freshman, and her budding relationship with Eileen Turner - a person unlike anyone Eileen has ever met. There are some familiar faces on the First Snow dev team: minute did some special chapter illustrations for the game, while adi helped color some CG's. The project is lead by TopHat, the GUI artist for Highway Blossoms: Next Exit, and was written by Suriko, one of our Celeste Academy authors.

Like I said, it'll be coming out totally free. You can add it to your Steam wishlist to know as soon as the game is released. We really love this game, and hope that you all will too!

In terms of miscellaneous news, the (hopefully last) batch of Spring 2020 merch has been shipped, so that should get into your mailboxes within the next few weeks. Everything is shipped via USPS, so given the current mail situation in the United States, please give your packages some extra time to arrive.

That's about all for this update. Talk to y'all again in September~

Josh