September Monthly Update (Patreon)

We've officially hit my favorite time of the year. Where summer's starting to wind down, but it's not quite autumn yet. A lot of characters I've written over the years have September birthdays just for that reason.

Anyway, with the end of August comes some good tidings. Highway Blossoms: Next Exit is just about done.

We'll have more information on a release date very soon. The last of the music tracks being wrapped up are the insert song and Jake Abernathie's new BGM for the game. Voice acting for the entire main cast wrapped up a few days ago, and audio engineering work continues. We also got the last of the backgrounds needed for the game, bringing the art total to 100%!

Along with NE, adi's put together a digital artbook that'll be released at the same time as Next Exit. It features all the art from both the original game and the DLC, plus bonus illustrations from over the years, and developer commentary. She and moekki also drew a beautiful new cover illustration for it as well! Like many things, we wanna do physical copies in the future, but hard to say when.

The Heart of the Woods artbook is also complete and ready for distribution! In fact, the .pdf version has already gone out to people who ordered it on Kickstarter. We'll have it up for sale on Steam and other platforms as soon as we can. Like the HB one, it features art and commentary, plus a couple of the bonus stories that we've posted here on Patreon. Physical copies of the HotW artbook are being printed as part of the HotW Kickstarter rewards, so we should have some extra copies of those for sale in the future. They're going to be the same size as a DVD case, in order to fit in the Collector's Box.

Please Be Happy is coming along nicely still. We've spent the last month or so at a bit of a creative roadblock, because we realized we didn't like how Miho was being characterized so far - basically, being too passive - so we've been thinking about how to change things up. We finally have a good direction in mind, and so scriptwriting can resume. Art progress never paused, though, and we just received the final CG from Kobuta! That means that aside from some arm poses and additional outfits, his share of the work for the game is just about finished!

Sarah's also close to completing the soundtrack for the game, and it's already amazing. We're going to be adding some live violin to it, which is super cool 👀 Violin and harpsichord are my two favorite instruments, so I'm really psyched for it. adi and I have also been working on the lyrics for an insert song, but… it's hard. I haven't written lyrics since high school, so I'm extremely out-of-practice (and never really in-practice to begin with). I'm happy with what we have so far, though.

Finally, if you haven't yet, please be sure to check out First Snow, which released for free on Steam a couple weeks ago! It's our second Bellhouse title and a really cute story!

Just yesterday, the OST for First Snow was also released. Check it out on our Youtube channel if you'd like. It'll be coming to Steam as a free download in a couple weeks, too.

With that, I think we've covered everything big since the last update. Talk to you again in a couple weeks.

Cheers,

Josh

P.S. Patreon recently implemented an option that lets you pledge the amount for an entire year at once, rather than month by month. You save 10% overall if you do it that way! If you're interested in taking advantage of this, you can change it by going up to your settings and modifying your pledge to us.