December 2023 Monthly Update (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

After the hustle and bustle of October, November was a much chiller and slower month overall. Between vacations and post-release breaks, a lot of us have been taking time off or working on other things. Still, as always, there's been some progress and announcements! Here's what's up:

-In terms of Patreon, the items for October and November's merch club went out a few days ago! Sorry on the delay for those ones. We'll send out this month's as soon as the illustrations are finished, which will probably be towards the end of the month. We have one image done already, but still need to get the seasonal one for folks who've been pledging to the merch club since the start! Also, we're aiming to release our first demo for the $15 and up tiers at the end of this month! It'll be just one scene long, for... well you'll see. It might come a little further into January - we'll see.

-We also released the Samayuni demo to streamers to play! Thanks to everyone who's played and responded to the feedback survey at the end of it. We've been watching a bunch of streams of the demo and it's been really fun! We'll be releasing it to the public pretty soon. Of course, working on Summer is our main focus right now, so we're plodding along on it at a good rate. We're still very early into the writing process, which also means we don't have many of the art writeups done yet. Getting those prepped for adi is one of our top priorities right now. We want to avoid a situation where we have a ton of art done before the scenes are written, so then it's too late to change things, but we also don't want to waste any time.

-We recently celebrated the first anniversary of Please Be Happy's release! We published a couple postmortems reflecting on the game - give those a read if you haven't yet! The physical anniversary merch bundles have started being shipped out, and all of them should be sent out by the start of next week. We're also sending out orders for almost all of the other Elanfest merch. The only exception is for orders that include a physical copy of Twofold - we haven't gotten those printed yet, so it'll be a little bit longer before we can send them out. We're hoping to start on printing them early next week though, so it shouldn't be too much longer. There's also the vinyl releases of the Please Be Happy Soundtrack and Highway Blossoms Dawn that just went up for pre-order! You can order them from the Very Ok Vinyl website, which also has the last couple copies of the Heart of the Woods soundtrack on sale if you'd like to pick one of those up. They're unlikely to be reprinted! Naturally, all of the releases come with a bunch of goodies too.

-We've seen a lot of people streaming and talking about Twofold! It's amazing to see the game resonate with so many people. Thanks for spreading the word and leaving reviews! It always helps, but especially with this release. We have our next Bellhouse game, Love In A Bottle, coming out in just a couple months! You can look forward to some more character song previews by Hazel soon, as well as the art. The release is slated for Valentine's Day!

December will probably be another kinda slow month overall, but we'll still have plenty to share, especially around the end of the year. We hope you all have a wonderful holiday season!