January 2022 Monthly Update (Patreon)

Hello, and happy new year! We hope everyone had a pleasant holiday season and a safe start to 2022. If you missed it, we posted a couple messages from some of our members in a post for the occasion. We chose to forego doing a longer, more in-depth post this year, but we didn't want to go totally silent. If you read the post, you probably saw that there's an important announcement in there: one of our members, Theo Minute, is going to be stepping down from most of their responsibilities at Studio Élan. We're wishing them all the best, and are glad that they'll still be helping us out with a few things, so it's not really a goodbye. Still, all of us are incredibly grateful for Theo's contributions to the studio - there'd be no Heart of the Woods or Samayuuni or many other things without them.

This does mean that we're going to be changing up a lot of things behind the scenes, across multiple projects. This includes the Lock & Key demo that we've been working on, as well as Please Be Happy. To be clear, the games themselves won't be changing - just the people working on them. We know we're already behind schedule with those, which we're really sorry about. We appreciate everyone's patience with them. Same goes for content here on Patreon - we know we haven't been posting as much here lately, but please be sure that we're aware and trying to improve on that. There's just a lot of stuff going on. Because we're saying "we appreciate your patience" and "thanks for your support" so often, I sometimes worry about it starting to sound trite. But we really do mean it - the fact that so many of you are here with us through all of the ups and downs means a lot to us. Knowing that we have people who care about us and about what we're doing is both a powerful motivator and comfort. So, thank you.

Anyway, that does mean that in terms of updates, there's not a whole lot new since last time. People have been spending time with families for the holidays of course, and adi is also taking a break to give her wrists some rest after all the drawing she's been doing, both for Élan projects and otherwise. One thing that she's proud to announce is that all of the sprites for PBH are done. Side characters and everything. This was one of the last big art milestones, so it's one I know she's happy to have achieved. We've been doing a lot of planning for the new year though, and have some exciting stuff happening soon. A lot of it is still stuff we can't talk about - generally due to the involvement of other parties beyond just us - but one thing I can say is that we're planning a neat video event sometime in February or March. I don't want to say toooo much until we have an actual date locked down, but we're planning to share a lot of new info there. I've been hinting at it for the last few updates and honestly, I'm itching to be able to announce and share with everyone. But, it's the kind of thing I really want to make sure we get perfect, and that requires double and triple confirming everything before we talk about it publicly. It'll be worth it though, I think.

One last time, thanks for reading and for another month of support. I'll talk to you guys again in February, if not sooner.

Cheers, and happy new year!

Josh