Monthly Progress Update: August

Hey everyone,

With July wrapping up, that’s our first full month on Patreon finished. Thanks so much to everyone who’s been supporting us! We hope you like the content we’ve put out so far and that you’ll stick around with us for a while. Something you feel like we should be doing differently or that you’d like to see? Hit us up in the comments or with an email to melanie@vnstudioelan.com.

It’s been a pretty big month for us. One of the most significant events is that we recently hired a new PR manager, Adri, who’s responsible for the much-improved Twitter content you’ve been seeing lately. We’re also working on starting to use Facebook as well as setting up a newsletter, so that people will have lots of options on how to stay up to date with what we’re doing. Right now we’re running a Twitter giveaway/contest, so check that out if you haven’t yet! 

Game progress has been good but a little bit slower this month as everyone recovered from releasing TWA:P and the HotW demo, as well as it being a kind of busy time IRL for some of us. That said, Rachel wrote a bunch of new scenes for Heart of the Woods, and we also got some lovely new art assets. One of those was the new Maddie outfit shown in one of our Patreon posts a couple weeks ago. We also got the last of the chapter artwork for HotW, since the final piece actually used that new outfit. Rosuuri had been busy finishing up some other commissions and stuff for various Comiket books, but she should be getting back to work on Heart of the Woods really soon. Similarly, Namie’s been busy with some other work too, but should be getting back to TWA CG’s this month as well. We’ll post some CG progress here when we have it. 

We’ve started pre-production for our NEXT two projects, which right now we’re just referring to as Unannounced Projects 1 & 2. We’ve been working with the artists for both games to get initial character designs done so that we can do public announcements of the games either late this year or early next year. Development won’t really start in earnest until HotW and TWA are released, though, or at least close to done.

Finally, with regards to the Patreon itself, we’re going to be modifying the schedule we mentioned last month just a bit. We realized that if we maintained that rate, we’d end up showing pretty much everything that’s completed within a couple months, and then we wouldn’t have anything for subsequent months - especially for stuff like music, which is 90% complete for both games and so won’t have a whole lot more coming out. To that end, we’re going to be making Music Monday more of a once a month thing (Music Monthday?), and possibly scaling back some of the other stuff a bit as well. We’ll still be doing at least one creative post, one technical post, and one update per project each month.

Thanks for sticking with us while we work everything out! Again, we’re super open to feedback and requests as far as the Patreon goes, so don’t be afraid to let us know what you think. Talk to you again soon~

Josh