March 2023 Monthly Update (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

With another month in the books, we've got big news to share today. The Summer progress train continues, with a good chunk of Izzy route writing being completed. Sarah finished up a couple more songs for the soundtrack, too, one of which we'll be sharing in a post later this month. It's one of my recent favorites; I keep listening to it just for fun, even when I'm not working on the game itself.

If you've been watching our livestreams, then you've probably seen adi working on some character designs for the game, too. The above characters are Summer's moms - aren't they lovely? Streams won't be as frequent from here on out, as there's more spoiler-y material that we don't want to show quite yet. However, adi will still be streaming when possible, so keep tuning into those~

These past couple weeks, you may have also seen her working on a new illustration for each one of our games. That brings us to our big news for the day:

In a little under 2 weeks, on March 12th, we're going to be launching a Kickstarter campaign. It'll have a goal of $10,000, and it's to print physical copies of Highway Blossoms, Heart of the Woods, and Please Be Happy.

These are only going to be the PC editions of the game, although the physical Switch and Playstation copies of Heart of the Woods should go on sale through Limited Run Games next month. In addition to the games, we'll also be printing physical copies of the artbooks and soundtracks, too. There aren't a whole lot of extra merch rewards this time, unlike the Heart of the Woods campaign, but there is a special postcard and sticker sheet included with each order. There are also a limited number of slots to get a hand-drawn shikishi commission from adi.

The games will have two versions: the Classic edition and the Webstore edition. The Webstore editions will only be sold on our shop (and this campaign, of course) but the Classic ones will be available at conventions and potentially other stores too. The webstore editions have a unique reversible cover with new art, and if you've been watching adi's streams, then you've seen that art already.

The games will all be priced at $30, artbooks are $25, and soundtracks are $20. For Highway Blossoms, the physical copies will be of the Gold Rush Edition, which includes the Next Exit DLC. There are a few bundle tiers available too - ordering all 3 games is $85, and ordering the Deluxe Bundle, which includes every game, artbook, and soundtrack, costs $190. We'll be announcing the campaign to the rest of the world soon, but for now, enjoy the secret heads up.

We're super stoked to FINALLY be able to offer physical copies of HB, and really glad that we can have them for PBH so soon after release. And while it's not HotW's first time getting physical, we've got a lot of new fans who weren't around for the first Kickstarter, so it's nice to be able to offer these.

Plus, to be perfectly honest, this has the opportunity to be a really big deal for us. In one of the earlier updates this year, I mentioned that we're looking to go more independent and try to not be so reliant on publishers and other outside parties. Because we're handling everything for this campaign ourselves, there's more risk, but there's also a lot more potential reward. If it goes well, it could actually be life changing for us. Of course, that's mostly daydreaming, and we're keeping the goals and scope of the campaign pretty modest. Still, dreaming big is nice sometimes.

Finally, we're working with our publisher to get set up on console devkits soon. Once that's all taken care of, our programmer Karen will be able to get started on the Please Be Happy console port. We don't yet know how long that'll take, but we're hoping it'll be fairly quick.

On top of all that, we have some cool posts for Patreon lined up for this month. The first one should be going up later today, in fact. Thanks for another month of support on here, and a pre-emptive thanks to anyone who pledges to the KS campaign when that goes live. Talk to you again soon.