Studio Élan - Physical copies of our yuri visual novels

Backerkit Surveys Sent + PBH Keychain Designs
about 1 year ago – Mon, Apr 24, 2023 at 02:50:11 PM

Hi everyone,

We've just sent out the survey links for Backerkit! Please check your emails for an invitation. You'll be able to fill out the survey and select which titles you want to receive from your pledges, as well as purchase any additional addons you may want. If you do choose to purchase extra items, please note that you won't be charged right away. Instead, you'll be charged when we close surveys and finalize addresses for shipping. This will be sometime in mid to late May - we'll post a one-week notice before we do it.

We had a lot of requests for them, so we've also made the keychains from the bundles available as addons too. We also put up a pair of acrylic standees featuring Miho/Aspen and Miho/Juliet. You can purchase all of these items at any time from our webstore, although there's a 20% discount for getting them on Backerkit. On a similar note, adi's finished the designs for the PBH couples keychains that were included in the bundles here! Aren't they adorable?

They're double sided, and feature different expressions on the back. You can also order these on Backerkit or our webstore!

If you pledged for one the shikishi tiers or other tiers with custom content, please keep an eye on your inboxes, because we'll be reaching out via email soon to collect details for your requests.

Thanks for your support!

Campaign Over!
about 1 year ago – Sun, Apr 09, 2023 at 11:33:24 AM

That's a wrap! Our Kickstarter has officially come to an end. In total, we were able to raise almost 5x our initial goal - thank you so much! Including the funds raised through the Korean group buy, our total amount is a little over $48,000 (with an additional 69 cents tacked on by someone. nice). We're really excited to get these printed and delivered! Having our whole catalogue available physically like this has been a goal from the start, and we really, really appreciate your help in achieving it.

Next up, we'll be opening Pledge Manager in the coming weeks, once everything has processed on Kickstarter. You'll get an invitation to join that service through email once it's set up. There, you'll be able to make your selections for which titles you want to receive, both from the reward tiers and addons. You'll also be able to purchase additional addons, even if you didn't commit the money for them in your base pledge. Due to popular demand, we'll be making the stickers and postcard available as addons too, in case you want to get more than one copy, but they're still limited to this campaign overall. Once orders close on Pledge Manager, that'll be it. Right now, we're planning to leave it open until sometime in May.

Although we didn't quite hit the stretch goal for Japanese localization, it's something we're still going to look into a little bit. We can't promise anything, but we've been in talks with some other groups that are pretty exciting.

For the Highway Blossoms light novels, we're planning to finalize the outline and get started later this year. Our goal is to have the first volume of it released next year!

Anyone who pledged at one of the custom content tiers, like the shikishis or Travel Guide, will be contacted in the next couple weeks to collect details. If you pledged at one of those tiers, then please keep an eye on your email and Kickstarter inbox for those.

It'll be a couple weeks before we place the order for all the items from our manufacturer, so that we can get an idea of quantities. Once items start being produced, and once we have a more solid idea of our shipping timeline, we'll update here again.

One last time, thanks for your support!

Light Novel Stretch Goal Achieved + Korean Group Buy Options
about 1 year ago – Mon, Apr 03, 2023 at 10:10:28 AM

Hello!

It's been a while since our last update, but we're thrilled to announce that we've hit the stretch goal for a light novel adaptation of Highway Blossoms! This is something we've talked about doing for years, and are excited to finally make it happen. The LN version will differ a bit from the VN version, because we'll be expanding on the story by a good amount. Since we don't have to worry about the costs of additional art or time spent programming, we can do a lot more with the writing in this format. We're not planning to change what happens in the story too much, only build on it. Also, this means that if it works geographically, we'll integrate the chosen location from the $1000 Travel Guide tier on the Kickstarter campaign into the light novel! We'll be contacting those who pledge for that tier sometime after the campaign ends in order to get details. And to say thank you, everyone who supports this campaign at $5 or more will get a free digital copy of the first volume of the light novel!

Paper copies of the books are something that we really really want to do, but it'll depend on how feasible it is. Our ideal plan is to work with an established light novel publisher to hopefully get them printed and distributed. But if we can't do that, we'll look into printing at least a few copies ourselves and sending them out that way. That's all far in the future though - first we've gotta write the damn things!

With about a week left to go on the campaign, our next stretch goal is for a Japanese translation of Please Be Happy! I think it's probably a shared dream of every English-original visual novel developer to have a chance at making a game that's well-liked in Japan, since VN's as a whole were born there and there's a lot more competition compared to the titles that get localized for the west. It's an uphill battle for sure, but we're really confident in PBH's quality and hope it'll resonate with players over there. We've already been in talks with someone about the translation and other plans for the JP version if it happens. We've mentioned this in a couple places, but we're already working on a Korean translation of the game. Because Miho is Korean and so much of her character is based around that heritage, Korean was the language we wanted to make our first priority in terms of translations.

On a related note, we have a group buy option for this Kickstarter campaign available for anyone who lives in Korea. This allows the shipping costs to be split between multiple people, since the expense to mail to Korea from the US can be quite high. The way that it works is you fill out this form below, which will allow you to list the items you want to purchase from our campaign. You'll pay the money directly to our contact in Korea, to whom we'll ship all of the items that everyone orders in one package. Then, they'll mail out the items to the final recipients. Please note that this is only available to those who live in South Korea. At the end of the campaign, we'll add the total amount raised through the group buy to our calculations for the total funding amount of the Kickstarter. The form to place a group buy order is here. Please note that there is a deadline of April 15th to pay for any orders placed for the group buy.

Korean Residents: If you wish to participate in the group order, please click on the link below. 한국 거주자: 공동구매 참여 하시고 싶은 사람은 아래 링크를 참조하세요.

Link

Preliminary Quantity Survey + Extra Keychain Bundle Slots Added
about 1 year ago – Wed, Mar 15, 2023 at 10:48:12 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Halfway to the LN + New High Tiers Added
about 1 year ago – Tue, Mar 14, 2023 at 10:11:11 AM

Yesterday, after a little over one day since launch, we passed the $20k mark and are now over halfway to the next stretch goal! Thank you for sharing our posts about the campaign, and for all the excitement we've seen about it☺️

To keep momentum going, we've decided to add a few new high-level tiers to try to help us hit some of the higher stretch goals! We really don't know how any of these will go and are tossing a few things at the wall, so let us know what you think of these ideas. But, we thought this could also be a cool opportunity to try something new, which is letting backers get involved a bit with what we're doing. So, here's what we've got. All of the following rewards will also include the physical deluxe bundle + the goodies. Please note that for all these tiers, we reserve the final right to decline and refund any requests that we're not comfortable fulfilling. If you'd like to ask about your idea before pledging, feel free to send us a message or an email!

$750 - You Tell Us So! Choose your favorite cryptid and we'll put together an (unvoiced) episode of I Told You So! that goes in-depth on it. Like all other episodes of ITYS, it'll be released for free. If you're not familiar, ITYS is our dubiously-canon spinoff of Heart of the Woods, named after Tara and Morgan's webshow. It features adorable chibi art by Theo, and is written by a variety of members of our team.

$1000 - The Travel Guide - Is there a certain location or sight that you wish Amber and Marina had visited during Highway Blossoms? Now's your chance to make that happen! Choose a US landmark or location, and we'll write a short story about the girls going to visit it, complete with a new illustration. If we hit the stretch goal for the HB Light Novelization, and if you choose something that's in the general vicinity of where the story already takes place (Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, California), then we'll write it into the official LN too.

$2000 - First Contact - Help design a side character in our upcoming game "Summer at the Edge of the Universe!" Summer and her friends will be traveling all across the galaxy, visiting a variety of planets and meeting all kinds of strange and wonderful folks. The sky's not the limit - it's just the beginning of the possibilities! You'll work with us to come up with the details for their physical appearance, and also stuff like personality and backstory. Their actual role in the game will be up to our discretion, but they'll receive a character sprite and have voiced lines. Please contact us first if you have any questions or want to get your idea approved. You may also optionally add $300 onto this tier and receive your choice of a color or black & white shikishi illustration of the character.