February 2022 Monthly Update

Hi all,

Just to start things off, if you haven't already heard, the Playstation and Xbox versions of Heart of the Woods will be coming out in just a couple weeks, on February 14th! These are the final ports of the game that we've been working on, so we can't wait to have them all wrapped up and completed.

Aside from that, January was a pretty productive month for us, with a lot of progress being made on the art and script for Please Be Happy. I'm really satisfied with some of the scenes I just finished, and I hope that they'll be well-loved when the game comes out too. Adi has been working on the CG's for the game, finishing up the ones that'll appear in Chapter 2. Here's a collage of some of what she's been working on.

Although I talk about the script and art in these updates a lot, I'd like to give a little context on the programming side of things, not just for PBH but for Lock and Key, as well. As you may know, our previous games - Highway Blossoms, Heart of the Woods, and even the PBH demo - are made on the Ren'py engine. Ren'py is great and we love using it, but unfortunately, it's PC-only. That means that for console releases, we have to get our games onto a different engine, typically Unity. For HotW, we worked with a porting group that took the complete Ren'py version of the game and adapted it to a console-friendly engine for those releases.

For the past year, maybe even a little longer, we've been going back and forth on whether to keep using Ren'py for our next games, and port them to console later, or start developing directly on Unity ourselves, so that we don't have to go through a third-party for porting and can release all versions at once. The issue comes from the fact that Unity is a lot harder to use than Ren'Py is. Ren'py basically works out of the box, doing everything you need it to and in a pretty simple way, so that even people on our team who aren't programmers can pick it up and easily contribute. On the other hand, using Unity requires a lot more hands-on technical work just to make something that can even run, and is a lot harder for non-programmers to get into.

We made the commitment to using Unity several months ago, since it would require a lot of time for the relevant people to learn and get familiar with, as well as constructing the actual base engine for our games to run on. Unfortunately, various circumstances have constantly pushed things back or complicated certain things, to the point where we're basically starting from scratch once again with Unity. Although it's not the only reason, the indecision over engines is a big part of what's caused the delays for Please Be Happy and the Lock and Key demo. At this point, we're thinking of keeping PBH on Unity and going back to Ren'Py for LAK, just so we can get the demo finished and released sooner.

Anyway, I just wanted to provide that information since I know people have rightfully been wondering about why we've kept pushing things back. Over the last few months, we've unfortunately had a few plans regarding Unity fall through already, although just yesterday our publisher set us up with someone who should hopefully be able to take care of the foundational work at least. Some of those same setbacks have affected us in other ways too, which I won't go into, but play a big part in why we've had to constantly readjust our expected releases. As mentioned before in another post, it's also why there's been a lot less material here on our Patreon lately - we've been in a constant state of trying to catch up on our main priorities, which has made it tough to find time to make additional, Patreon-exclusive content. I've already gone into that before so I won't repeat myself here, but I do want to say again that we're really grateful for those of you who continue to support us here even when we're less active.

All that aside, we do still have some exciting things coming up - which you probably won't be surprised to hear have ended up delayed from what we initially planned, hence why we've been teasing some of this stuff for months now. We've also still been able to do some neat stuff like releasing the First Snow voice acting patch and merch last month. If nothing else we're always busy - probably too busy at times, and always looking forward to sharing what we're working on with you.

That about does it for this month, so I'll wrap up there. See you next time!