June 2021 Mid-Month Update (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

It's been a while, huh? The end of May and June so far have been a really hectic time emotionally and development-wise for us, so we appreciate y'all's patience as Patreon has been slow this month. Lots has happened in June already, so as promised, this is gonna be a big recap. Let's see...

As part of Wholesome Direct a couple weeks ago, we released the Please Be Happy Demo as well as the voice cast! We held auditions for the game nearly a year ago at this point, so we've been sitting on that info for a long, long time. The reception from the announcement and release have been amazing so far. The full game will (hopefully) be out later this year, including on console, but you can try out the demo right away if you haven't yet.

Check out the voice acting trailer here!

Speaking of console, we finally sent out the Heart of the Woods Switch keys to Kickstarter backers. The second batch has been filled too, so if you were waiting for one from the first time we sent keys, you should be set now. The full release of the game on Switch will be July 8. We're still working on a couple last minute changes, like making the font size larger. We ourselves didn't get to see the game running on Switch until these keys were ready, since all of the testing was done by the porter and publisher. All issues should be resolved by the time the game goes live to everyone, though. HotW will be coming to other console platforms later this year.

Speaking of console again, Highway Blossoms is coming to consoles too! It'll be called the Gold Rush Edition of the game, which includes Next Exit, and was just announced as part of our celebration for the game's 5th anniversary. We don't have exact dates or platforms yet, but it should be out this year too. In fact, a lot of the porting work is already done, at least for the base game, so it should be a relatively speedy process.

Along with the console announcement, we also had a new illustration from moekki and kamifish to celebrate 50k steam copies of Highway Blossoms sold. Between that and the humble bundles we've been part of, this little game has gone further than we ever dreamed.

We've got a ton of new merch coming to the store soon too, including some non-HB stuff like new PBH charms from adi. We thought about splitting everything up into multiple releases just because of how many items we have, but didn't wanna make people order and pay for shipping more than once. We've recently had to raise our prices on merch a little, but that's because we're going to switch to fulfilling keychain orders and other stuff not handled by Printful ourselves. Previously we'd been working with a third-party for fulfillment on those items, which is why shipping for them could be so unreliable. By doing it ourselves, there should be fewer issues overall, but we have to charge a bit extra to cover printing and the cost of shipping supplies and stuff that we don't normally keep on hand.

Now that the slew of June announcements is over, we should be getting back to our regular posts and updates on here again. It's unlikely we'll have so much big news crammed into a few week span a second time. Of course, we'll keep everyone posted on porting progress with HB and dev progress with PBH. As always, thanks for your support, and see you next time.