Heart of the Woods Limited Merchandise Store

February Porting Update
about 3 years ago – Mon, Feb 15, 2021 at 11:50:24 PM

Hi everyone,

Today is the second anniversary of the original PC release of Heart of the Woods, and we're excited to finally be able to share that news we've been talking about for a while.

We're super pleased to announce that Ratalaika has taken over and will be finishing the port for Heart of the Woods very soon. Ratalaika has ported a great number of visual novels to console, especially games made on Ren'Py like ours. For a number of reasons, the port already had to be restarted twice, which is what led to the setbacks and delays. With Ratalaika, we're finally in good hands and are confident that the game will be complete soon. Once it's complete and playable, there will still be several weeks of testing and certification before it can be released, so right now we're looking at a Q2 release date for the game. However, we're going to be sending keys to backers early ahead of the release. We're not able to do that until the game has finished certification, so it'll still be a little while yet, but we're doing our best to get them into your hands (and consoles) ASAP.

As for the physical rewards, we've found a supplier for the last few items and will be sending files over for printing this week. If all goes according to plan, everything should be ready to start shipping to backers next month. We'll provide another update before shipping begins, but make sure to update your address on Backerkit if it's changed since the Kickstarter campaign! If you need help with doing that, you can send us a message on here.

Once again, we appreciate y'all's patience with this campaign, we know it's taken longer than expected. The end is in sight though - thanks for sticking it out with us!

December Progress Update
over 3 years ago – Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 12:10:55 AM

Hey everyone,

Sorry this update's taken a while. As mentioned before, we've been waiting for permission to announce something cool regarding the Switch port. Unfortunately we're still waiting to be able to do that (contract negotiations have taken a while) but we do have some good news to share today! Real quick, as a reminder, you can leave a comment on the KS page here if you have questions and we'll usually get back to you in a day or two.

Anyway, the good news is that most of the merchandise is printed, and is either in Los Angeles or will soon be. We still need to get the game and soundtracks, as well as the collector's boxes printed, but most of the other stuff is complete.

Our goal right now is to have everything printed and ready to ship by the end of January, and for shipping to begin around then or in February. If your address has changed since you filled out your Backerkit survey, please make sure to update that on the Backerkit website so your rewards will go to the right address! If you need any assistance with that, feel free to send us a message here on Kickstarter and we'll help you out. We'll also post another, final reminder about addresses once the items are ready to actually be sent out.

February is also when we're hoping to release the Nintendo Switch Port at this point. First the game will have to go through Nintendo's approval process and then an exact date will be determined with them. We know it's taken a loooot longer than expected at first, and so we really appreciate everyone's patience with this. We're super proud of the voice acting update from earlier this year, and if you've played the game on PC, we hope you loved it too.

Thanks for all your support through this difficult year and through past ones as well. We're really excited for everything we have coming up, both Heart of the Woods and other projects. We're wishing you all a safe and happy new year!

With love,

Studio Élan

Digital Artbook Distributed
over 3 years ago – Mon, Aug 31, 2020 at 03:45:22 PM

Hey everyone,

We've just sent out the .pdf version of the official artbook for all orders that included a digital copy. It features all the art from the game, commentary from us, and even a couple short stories that were originally written for our Patreon, with bonus illustrations by minute and adirosa. We hope you enjoy reading through it!

In terms of other updates, unfortunately we don't have a whole lot to share right now. The console port is still being finished up, and the rewards are still on back-order with our supplier right now. Like before, we'll post an update on the status of those once we have news on them. We appreciate your patience!

Aside from that, we're super thrilled that the voice acting update has been so well-received. We'd like to extend one final "thank you!" to the voice actors and crew that made it possible, as well as you backers. If you've played through the newest version of the game, let us know which scenes were your favorites to experience with voices. We love hearing your thoughts on the game!

Finally, if you're looking for another wintry yuri visual novel to enjoy, we'd like to introduce you to First Snow! While it's not a game that we developed ourselves, we published it under our Bellhouse branch, and the game was just recently released on Steam. The game was developed by Salty Salty Studios, although minute contributed some art for chapter transitions, and adi helped with CG's. The game is totally free, and very sweet. If you enjoyed HotW, you'll probably enjoy First Snow too.

Heart of the Woods Voice Acting Update Released
almost 4 years ago – Mon, Jul 13, 2020 at 01:18:43 AM

The voice acting update for Heart of the Woods is now live! Thanks to everyone who joined us on the stream where we previewed the update and pressed the button~ We're also super grateful to our wonderful cast, engineers and to Studio Coattails. Adding voices to Heart of the Woods is something we've wanted to do since before we even released the game, so it's great to finally have it happen.

Originally, we were going to wait and release the update simultaneously with the Nintendo Switch version of the game. However, since we're already running behind schedule, we figured we'd go ahead and make it available as soon as we could. Which is today! Let us know on Twitter what some of your favorite lines are, and your overall thoughts on the update.

Speaking of the Switch version, we're happy to say we have a playable build that's currently in testing! There's still a bit of work to be done on it, such as updating the fonts and squashing a couple bugs, but we're definitely in the endgame now.

This week or next, we should be submitting the final merchandise designs and start getting the rest of the items printed. Please make sure your shipping address on Backerkit is up to date! We'll be putting out another reminder before we lock down addresses, but don't wait too long!

We couldn't have done this without you guys, our backers here on Kickstarter. Thank you for helping us make this possible. A lot of hard work and love went into this update. We hope you all love it as much as we do!

HotW Voice Patch Preview Stream - July 12th @ 10pm Eastern
almost 4 years ago – Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 12:39:18 AM

Hey y'all,

Quick update today to let you know that we're going to be doing a livestream this Sunday, July 12th, at 10pm Eastern time, where we'll be previewing the voiced version of HotW  (on PC, not Switch). Several of the developers will be there, and we'll also be joined by Allie Goodell and Stephanie Arata, the voice actresses of Maddie and Tara. We'll be playing through a couple selected scenes from the game, as well as talking about the development process and answering any questions that we get.

You'll be able to join us on Youtube - hope to see you guys there!

In other news, we just announced one of our upcoming titles, "Please Be Happy," which we're aiming to release later this year. It's a comfy slice-of-life story about a foxgirl in fantasy Wellington, New Zealand. You can check out the trailer for it right here!