October Monthly Update (Patreon)

Hi y'all,

Unlike last time, we do have a good amount of news to recap from the past couple weeks! On that note though, real quick, we're probably going to move back to just doing once-a-month updates unless we actually have something worthwhile to report for the mid-month ones. Lately a lot of those updates have just been "business as usual," so when that's the case, we're just gonna skip it. We'll still be doing one at the start of every month, though! Anyway, with that out of the way…

The biggest news from recently is about the First Snow voice acting update! First Snow was the second title we released under our Bellhouse publishing wing, and we're excited for it to be receiving partial voicing in the next few months. Like our other games, the voice acting is being handled by Studio Coattails, and has a few familiar actors you may know from "Heart of the Woods" and "Highway Blossoms." Check out the new voice acting trailer on our Youtube channel. The VA trailer itself is a bit of a sequel to the original trailer, so maybe give that one a watch too if you haven't seen it.  We'll also have some First Snow merchandise coming out when the VA patch does, which should be this Winter. You can see the charms that adi drew just below, and we'll have other items too~

On the subject of merch, we have some new items of our own dropping soon too, featuring some new designs by Clivenzu! Cliven is one of my favorite artists, so it was a real pleasure to get to work with her on these. We'll also be doing a limited reprint of Adi's "Ridere" artbook, so if you missed out on those the first time around, you'll have a chance to snag a copy here.

Most of the orders from our webstore for the HB anniversary merch and restocks were sent out a few weeks ago - orders that included the HB Stargazing mousepad or the PBH sticker sheet weren't sent but will be soon. We needed to get different, larger packaging for orders with the mousepad, and order the sticker sheets themselves, since they were missing from our first batch. As a bonus, we've also started adding some special, unique stickers by Theo into random merch orders, too! We'd like to start doing this for all orders once we have the designs and supplies to do so.

On a related note, the final* HotW Kickstarter orders were sent out this week as well, and should be arriving in everyone's hands soon, if not by now! Tweet us a picture of your rewards or merch and we'll retweet it - we'd love to see!

*Unfortunately, due to a temporary pause in USPS service, we're not able to send merch or Kickstarter orders to Australia at this time. We'll start fulfilling those orders as soon as we're able to. Certain items from our webstore like clothes and totes should still be sendable, since those are printed and mailed from overseas, but keychains and other items that we ship directly ourselves aren't.

In order to celebrate the first anniversary of Highway Blossoms: Next Exit, which was last Saturday, we also have these new, huge fabric posters available on our store! These take a while to print but are also able to be sent anywhere, including Australia. I ordered one myself, and can't wait to decorate my bedroom with it.

The day of the anniversary was also Tess' birthday, and the day before that was Aspen's! It was also Bi Visibility week, and adi drew a new Aspen illustration to celebrate the occasion.

As you can see, adi's been drawing a lot lately. She's been taking a bit of a break from PBH stuff to work on the Lock and Key GUI, as well as the First Snow keychains shown above. In the meantime, scriptwriting for PBH and demo progress for LAK are going pretty smoothly. On top of that, Syon's started writing for Izzy's route in "Summer at the Edge of the Universe." He's unfortunately stuck in quarantine for another week, so he's been putting his time in isolation to good use. We can't wait to show you more Summer stuff next year, after PBH and LAK are finished.

That about does it for this month, I think! Talk to you again at the start of November, or sooner if we've got something worth sharing. Stay spooky!