October Monthly Update (Patreon)

Note: This post contains some very light spoilers for HB: Next Exit, so if you want to avoid those, don't read the rest of this.

Hi hi, and welcome to another monthly update. We've actually managed to put these out a few months in a row now, which I think is kind of a record for us.

Anyway, the big news of course issssss: Highway Blossoms: Next Exit is now available! It's been out for a little over a week now, and we've seen a lot of people enjoying it, which is always a big relief. I've said before that we were worried about whether or not people would still care about Amber and Marina, but there was a lot of other stuff to worry about too. Whether or not people would enjoy the focus on Tess and the trio, or the multiple viewpoints (and verb tenses), or even the plot itself. Fortunately, all those seem to have been pretty well-received.

Setting the DLC in Las Vegas was really the logical conclusion of one of the first things that Syon and I decided: we knew it would include Cassi more. Her backstory and character arc were mostly my responsibility. When we first started writing, Cassi's passion for sweets didn't exist and she was only participating in the convention out of obligation to her job. It made her kind of hard to like, since her only character trait ended up being "doesn't like things" and well, that's already an Amber character trait. So we changed things around to what you get now, which I think was the right decision.

Next Exit was half the length and only half the development time of most of our other titles, but it managed to be just as stressful as a full-size project. Some of us will be taking a bit of a break, and while you'll still see us around and our social media will still be active, October's going to be a slight pause in terms of Elan stuff. For instance, I'm going to be attempting to finish writing a route for a project I was part of a long time ago. Hopefully the sixth or seventh (or whatever attempt number I'm on) time is the charm.

Already, a couple people have asked if we have plans for even more Highway Blossoms content in the future. The honest answer is: who knows? There are plenty of concepts and ideas that we've tossed around, but as to whether or not any will get pursued, I'm not sure. It won't be anytime soon if we do, I can guarantee that much, because we have like 4 other games we need to get through first. We think Amber and Marina's story is in a good place right now, so there's not a whole lot of need to add to it, in the same way that we wanted to correct some of the lingering issues that remained between them after the original game.

So where do we go from here? Well, our next major release will be Please Be Happy. We're not totally ruling out a 2020 release of the Switch Port for HotW at this point, but it's fully out of our hands. We'll have a bigger update on PBH sometime soonish. After that's out, a few of us will be moving from PBH to working on Samayuuni. Meanwhile, Lock and Key is still under development, and we're aiming for it to release in 2021.

This time last year, we were pretty confident that 2020 was going to be an extremely busy year for us. While that definitely turned out to be true, it wasn't in quite the ways that we hoped, given Everything Going On Out There. 2021, on the other hand, will be our year! Not just in terms of releases, but hopefully in terms of cons and merch and stuff too. That's the dream, at least. Just gotta keep working for it.

As always, thanks for being a part of things with us. Until next time (and even after that), take care.

Josh

PS: One of the other main reasons we started the DLC was to answer a question that even we didn't know the answer to: what DID Marina want to get for Amber last time they were in Las Vegas? It was something that we didn't think would be very important and just a side detail that would be overlooked. We definitely didn't expect "what was Marina's present to Amber going to be?" to be the most common question.