We're gearing up to head to OffKai Expo in San Jose in just a little over a week! This will be our third year attending, and we're excited to see those of you who will be there as well! This year, we've got a lot of our team who will be attending, including some […] The post We’re Heading to OffKai Expo! appeared first on Studio Élan.

That’s right, gamers. We’re excited to share that our foxgirl-focused visual novel Please Be Happy is now available on modern consoles! It was a long process getting here, and we’re grateful to our console publisher Sometimes You for helping us make this a reality! The game’s release is slightly staggered across time zones, so if […] The post Please Be Happy Now Available on Consoles! appeared first on Studio Élan.

Surprise – if you owned Episode 1, you now own the Complete Edition! That’s right, due to Unforeseen Circumstances, we’ve released the new definitive edition of National Park Girls as an update to the base game. It’ll be the only version available on Steam from here on out, so if you haven’t tried National Park Girls before, now’s the perfect time to try it! National Park Girls is a yuri adventure visual novel about Eve, a disgruntled park ranger burnt out after years of feeling her work is all for nothing, discovering that there may be something more to the national parks—like a group of women claiming to be the manifestations of the national parks themselves?! This complete edition has all 5 episodes of the story as well as a few new features such as a trivia section and expanded CG gallery. National Park Girls also features full English voice acting! Steam itchio You can also get National Park Girls keychains and physical copies of the game & artbook on our webstore. The post National Park Girls – Love Our Parks Edition Now Available! appeared first on Studio Élan.

With another year in the books, we’d like to once again wish everyone a happy New Year from us here at Studio Élan. Even compared to past years, this one really flew by. We started it off having just released Please Be Happy, and beginning work for Summer at the Edge of the Universe. In March, we launched our Kickstarter campaign to produce physical copies of our games and artbooks, which we shipped out later in the year in July. In June, we sponsored OffKai Expo, where we had a booth and panel along with Virtuality Project. A couple months later, we released the final episode of National Park Girls, marking the end of a multi-year development period. Only a couple weeks after that, we were back with 2023’s Élan Festival, where we announced some new merch and… announcements. We ended off the month of October with the release of Twofold, another game that’s been in development for a long, long time. Now, we’re here! Phew. Thinking back, it’s kind of insane just how much we managed to accomplish in 2023. Everyone worked really hard on everything, and the results speak for themselves. We couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve done. Of course, 2024 is looking to be just as busy, if not more. If all goes well, we’ll be releasing at least one game this year – maybe even more than one. You can look forward to more news on Our Home, My Keeper, as well as Lock & Key: A Magical Girl Mystery. We’ll be holding a Kickstarter campaign for the latter of those two sometime this year. Of course, our next big, big project will be Summer at the Edge of the Universe, the solarpunk visual novel. After first announcing this one back in early 2020, we had to put it on the shelf for a while in order to work on Please Be Happy and some other stuff. But now, we’re finally here and working on it, and it’s already shaping up to be something special. Although that’s true for every game we make, this one is already something different. It’s our biggest game to date, in terms of concept and scope. There are three different routes, and each one will have a variety of different planets to explore and unique characters to meet. After doing a lot of slice-of-life and modern fantasy stories, it’s refreshing to be working on something truly out there and different. That’s why we’re really excited to publicly share the demo of the game with you all today! It can be downloaded from Steam or itch.io. It’s roughly as long as the Please Be Happy demo was – about 18,000 words, or 2-4 hours of playtime depending on your reading speed. We’ve been refining this demo with feedback from our Patreon members and streamers over the past couple months, and we think you’re all gonna love this one too. Check out the breathtaking new key visual by the game’s character artist adirosa. Just like with the PBH demo, there’s a link at the end to a survey where you can leave us your thoughts on what you played. We read every single one, and can’t wait to see what you think. Those aren’t the only games we have in the works, too. At basically all times, we have an unannounced project or two in our back pockets, just waiting to be shared. To start off this year, we’re going to be offering our Patreon members an exclusive glimpse into one of these new worlds… Join our Patreon at the “Demo Access” (※ USD $15) tier or higher to access a demo for a new game — you can find out more about it (including the title of the game!) here. Finally, at the end of this beginning, we’d like to finish this post with some messages from our team. Thank you for another year of your support of us and what we do. We’re grateful for each and every one of you, and can’t wait for you all to see what comes next. Looking back on something at the very end makes time feel like it flew by so fast, even if in the moment it didn’t. We had a lot of “firsts” this year, our most notable probably the Kickstarter for physical copies of our games. We were confident (albeit still nervous) that it would hit the goal but we were blown away by how much it shot past the initial goal. Physical merch is a dream for any creative. I say it every year, but really, we could not be doing what we love without your support. Everyone at Élan is passionate about yuri & queer games, but passion only takes you so far—you consistently showing up and validating what we make is what allows us to keep moving forward. If you see art you enjoy, let the creator know it. Your voice is more impactful than you’ll ever realize. We have a lot more planned for 2024 and I hope you’ll all enjoy it! Plenty more cute girls to meet and fall for – Arimia ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ Another year has passed… Every year it feels like I’m running nonstop, looking only ahead at each new thing on my to-do list, and this year was no different. I lived through 2021 and 2022 with a constant stream of ‘when PBH is finished and out, when PBH is finished and out’ and at the end of last year, we finally released PBH. Somehow despite not having a PBH to release, it was still so busy and there’s yet still so much left I want to do. Congratulations to Syon and the NPG development team for the completion of the National Park Girls series. Congratulations to the staff of Twofold, and especially Caps and Theo for the release of Twofold. It’s been an honor to watch such monumental and important chapters of my friends’ lives come to a close, and I’m excited for what comes next. I’ve been endlessly proud of my friends this year, and maybe this year I can be a little proud of myself too. I’ll keep working hard, and I hope you all love what we’ve got in store. Thank you and see you again next year! – adi ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ I swear I was just writing the 2022 retrospective a few days ago. Time truly is an inescapable black hole. With the completion of National Park Girl’s six year production, and Twofold’s eleven year production, this is a fact I’ve had to reckon with more and more. So many chapters of my life coming to a close, and with them, new uncertainties abounding. Not for long, though. The great thing about this job is that there’s always something right over yonder, thank Melanie. Summer is the next big push, the next summit. We’re all firmly on that hike now. But between now and then, there’s going to be other peaks I’m excited to reach. The Highway Blossoms light novel, for one. Plus all the things we have in our back pocket that we haven’t announced yet. All of this combined points to 2024 being our busiest year yet, and every day that promise inches ever forward. – Syon ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ Another year in the books, huh? Time sure does fly. 2023 was an especially difficult year for me for several reasons, including major surgery that took me out of the game for a while. But I’m back now and ready to keep up our wonderful work! Speaking of wonderful work, I am SO PROUD of the Twofold and National Park Girls teams for releasing their long-awaited games so the whole world can enjoy them!!! Mazel tov to everyone involved! This year we also announced Lock and Key’s rebirth! Our magical journey is being rebuilt with new art, new design, new scenes, and new choices. Please look forward to our kickstarter in 2024! To all my fellow Élan members: thank you. I couldn’t have gotten through this year without your support. And of course, thank you to everyone out there who played and enjoyed our games this year! 2024 will bring you even more wonderful yuri, so stay tuned! Love, Rachel ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ 2023 was a year of milestones. My first full year officially under Élan (though no matter how much time passes, I’ll always have to copy/paste the “É”) also marked the release of two projects I’d been involved with for a long time: National Park Girls, which I had been involved with for six years, and of course Twofold, which had been pretty much the center of my life for eleven. Looking into the horizon, there’s already a fair amount on my plate, though at times I still find myself feeling sort of aimless with long-standing constants in my life now in the rear-view mirror. With so many exciting things starting to form from everyone here, I’m optimistic that feeling will be easy to shake off. I hope to see you there. – caps ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ 2023 was my first year officially as part of Studio Élan, and so much has happened here in just the one year — not just for myself, but for everyone. The full release of Twofold went gold 2 months ago after multiple years of hard work from everyone on the development team, and the final episode of National Park Girls was released 3 months ago, concluding the story that was started all the way back in 2019. Congratulations to everyone involved on each title for achieving these significant milestones! As for me, I worked on Please Be Happy, Highway Blossoms, Heart of the Woods, Summer at the Edge of the Universe, as well as many more things that are coming up behind the scenes. From things like making major overhaul updates, to mastering and shipping physical PC releases, and even working on the PS5/PS4/Switch releases for Heart of the Woods, 2023 was a very eventful year. It’s an honour for me to be able to work with and help out all the amazing people here at Élan. Looking to 2024, there’s a lot coming up that I’m excited about — please look forward to it! As always, thank you all for supporting Studio Élan! 〜 Karen/あけみ (akemin_dayo) (※ Also, here’s an Akemi Tech Tip™ for all you macOS users reading this: You can type the É in Élan by pressing Alt-E, then typing E!) ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ I think I can safely say that 2023 was one of the best years of my life. While the lows were very low, the highs were enough to make them practically irrelevant. Every year that I get to keep working on these games with this team is such a joy. I really couldn’t ask for any more. I also think I’m more excited than ever with what we have coming up in 2024 and beyond, especially Samayuni. I’m optimistic in a way I didn’t know I still could be, after doing this for almost a decade. I’m happy to be wrong sometimes. Meeting people at OffKai Expo who had heard of us and were excited to meet us was insane. Thanks to everyone who’s played one of our games this year, or talked about us or watched a stream. Please keep following us – I know that it’ll be worth it. – Josh ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ ＊ Wait, 2023’s ALREADY OVER? It felt like it just started! In all seriousness though… Wow, what a year! I was fortunate enough to see the release of two incredible games at Studio Élan: the finale of National Park Girls, and the long-awaited Twofold… Both of these titles had an impressive amount of love and care poured into them, and I’m happy that the whole world can now experience these beautiful stories. (By the way, I cried a lot over Twofold – it hits like a sack of bricks!) As one of the social media managers, I learned a lot of things this year with... The post Happy New Year 2024 from Studio Élan! appeared first on Studio Élan.

Hello and welcome to the end of another year! As we bid farewell to 2022, like always, we wanted to leave off with a couple brief messages from members of our team. This has been a busy, busy year and we’ve really appreciated everyone’s support all throughout it. We’ve asked Melanie to put together a quick video to wrap things up, as she looks back on what we did this year and what’s coming in the next one. Our next big project will be Summer at the Edge of the Universe, and we’re already hard at work on it. The last new piece of art we have to share for 2022 is this illustration of Summer, drawn by the game’s artist adirosa. In 2023, stay safe, stay healthy, and please, be happy. Messages from Studio Élan I only officially joined Elan recently, so it’s hard for me to reflect on the past year. Instead, let me express my excitement for the next year: being asked to work on National Park Girls way back when was how I officially got involved in this circle, and Twofold is the reason why that even happened in the first place. They’re both projects that are special to me for different reasons, and having both their releases mark my first full year at Elan makes me really happy. So happy new year, and see you again soon! – caps Thanks to everyone at Studio Élan for a great 2022, and looking forward to an even better 2023! I’m glad I was able to be a part of Please Be Happy, and even more glad that people have been resonating so much with it! I hope you’ll love what we’re working on next, too! – Sarah I joined Studio Élan back in August of 2022, so my reflections on the past year will be shorter… but I’m honored to be a part of a development team that I’ve admired for ages. (Like, back when Heart of the Woods was still in development!) I’m really happy Please Be Happy got its full release this year. It’s a beautiful, polished work and I’m glad everyone can finally experience Miho’s heartwarming story. I’m also intrigued by the new updates on Summer at The End of The Universe and Lock and Key – it’s nice to see them again after so long! I’m certain that 2023 will be a fantastic year for Studio Élan – and I look forward to doing even more great work for them in the future. Onwards and upwards! – Mado It’s been half a decade since I started Studio Élan, and I remember at the time thinking I’d be lucky if I was still doing it now. I am, and I feel even more fortunate than I did back then. Every year getting to make these games alongside some of my favorite people in the world is a real honor, and I’m proud of everything we achieved in 2022. I’m even more excited about what’s coming next, and I really think our future couldn’t be brighter. – Josh What a wild year 2022 has been! It’s crazy to think that our lil Studio has been around for 5 years now; I still remember how exciting it was when Josh first told me about his plans to create this wonderful team. And it’s even more exciting to see things kicking off in a major way! We over on team Magical Girl were thrilled to share our demo for Lock and Key: A Magical Girl Mystery with all of you, and we hope you’ll look forward to the full release next year. But of course, the real star of the show this year was the full release of Please Be Happy! I’m so proud of the team for making such an amazing game, and it was great to experience it myself (team Juliet ftw btw!) While things have been tough elsewhere, I’m going to keep on working hard for all of us! Here’s to a magical 2023! – Rachel With 2022 coming to a close, it’s been over 3 years since I first started at Élan, throwing tweets your way that are sometimes funny. This year we met a lot of new faces and started working with lots of new people for different projects- some you’ve seen, some you’ll have to wait and see ♥ The visual novel sphere is rather small but I really love being able to still meet new, incredibly talented people within it and work with them on projects they’re passionate about. If anything, I hope you take a chance in 2023 to become passionate about something of your own and share that wonder with someone else. Here’s to better year for all of us, and congrats on making it another year. – Arimia 2022 has been a super cool year with Studio Élan. I learned how to do many things from everyone, and am still learning to improve. Helping release Please Be Happy weren’t goals I thought I would have back last year, but now Studio Élan and their projects are now apart of my new year’s goals. I’m looking forward to the future with everyone at the studio! -z04 2022 was a very transitory year. You’ve heard of liminal spaces? Well, meet liminal time. It was a lot of moving different people, things, and projects into place to set up the monster that will be 2023. Coattails folding into Elan and Please Be Happy releasing were part of greater incantation cast to facilitate the future, now our present. Going forward. we’re all playing for keeps. It’s like everything we’ve learned and every skill we’ve developed over the last ten years was preparing us for what comes next. It’s not quite tangible yet, but the vibe has shifted. How could I look at the conclusion of National Park Girls and Twofold, and the beginning of Summer, and not feel like there’s something big tiptoeing just beyond our sight? I don’t know what this great giant will look like when its head pokes over the horizon, but there is no better place than this studio, with these people, to face it down alongside of. Make no mistake about it —there is magic here. – Syon What a year!!! Thank you for the continued love and support. It’s pretty wild to think that this makes 5 years of Élan development. We managed to release Please Be Happy this year, thank goodness – I hope you’ve enjoyed it! It was a creatively fulfilling and hectic year, but I’m not ready to stop just yet… Next stop, the edge of the universe! – adi The post Happy New Year 2023 appeared first on Studio Élan.

Please Be Happy is out now on PC! Play it now on: Steam ♥ itch.io Despite her years spent observing humans, she still has a lot to learn about their culture and society. She’s made a living so far as a thief, her heightened senses allowing her to easily take advantage of people. She’s also seen a lot of the worst of what mankind has to offer. It’s only after meeting Juliet, the owner of a small library, and Aspen, an aspiring novelist, that Miho starts to understand what kindness is, and that there’s more than just the bad stuff when it comes to people. Please Be Happy is a comfy, slice-of-life experience about exploring what it means to be happy. It features: Thank you for following along during the development of PBH! From all of us at Studio Élan, we hope you enjoy this new tale. The post appeared first on Studio Élan.

Happy Halloween everyone! Today, we’re excited to announce that the Studio Élan family is getting a little bigger, as we’ll be officially merging with Studio Coattails. As the co-developers of Highway Blossoms, we’ve worked closely with Coattails for years and have several overlapping members and projects. So, we decided to make it official and join forces once and for all. From here on out, Coattails games like National Park Girls and other currently unannounced titles will be released under the Studio Élan name instead. Our first new release with Coattails will be the upcoming Episode 5 of National Park Girls, titled Eternal Evergreen pt. 2, which is slated to be released in January 2023! Episode 5 will be the final episode, concluding the story that began in 2019. National Park Girls is the story of Eve Aadams, a United States national park ranger stationed at Yosemite National Park. After a stressful work incident, Eve encounters three strange girls who claim to be Zion, Yellowstone and Yosemite themselves! Follow her as she gets closer with these supernatural cuties – and discovers a new kind of love for the parks themselves. Although our focus is and will continue to be on making sapphic visual novels and games, with this new expansion, we may occasionally release other kinds of games in the future as well. In addition to making games, Studio Coattails also provides voice acting casting and directing, and will continue to offer and operate this service under the Studio Coattails name. Along with the news of the merger, we also have something else we’re excited to share with you: a release date for our next game, Please Be Happy. We’re thrilled to announce that it’ll be coming to PC in just three weeks, on November 21, 2022! Please Be Happy is the story of Miho, a Korean fox spirit or gumiho, who arrives in Wellington, New Zealand as part of a lifelong search for a particular human. Set in a fantasy version of our own world, PBH is a relaxed, slice-of-life story about finding fulfillment and what it means to be alive. We began working on PBH in earnest in 2020, and after numerous setbacks, restarts, and changes, we’re so happy to finally be sharing it with the world. Written by Josh (Heart of the Woods, Highway Blossoms) and with art and direction by adirosa, this will be our longest game to date. It will only be available for PC/Mac/Linux on its initial launch, but we’re aiming to have it out on Nintendo Switch and other consoles in early 2023. The game features 2 different romantic routes with 2 happy endings each, and includes full English voice acting, over 40 CG’s, and a brand new soundtrack by Sarah Mancuso. Finally, if you’re going to be at anime expo chibi in Ontario, California next month, then make sure to come see us in the Dealer’s Hall at Table 120, right by the Artist Alley. We’ll have merch for sale as well as free goodies to giveaway. This is our first time ever appearing at a convention on our own, so we’re hoping to meet lots of you there! The post A Big Halloween Announcement or Two appeared first on Studio Élan.

Who is the Red Queen is now released on Steam! Who is the Red Queen? is a horror fantasy lesbian visual novel developed by 4noki & co. that follows Alice falling into a strange and familiar Wonderland in search for the Red Queen’s missing pieces. As our third Bellhouse title, we’re excited to finally bring this to you! The game features over 30,000 words and has 3 major endings… with plenty of dead ends, of course. If you’ve already played the game jam version from itch.io, don’t worry- this is an updated version with new art, music, an updated script, and a Spanish translation! Can you find all of the dismembered pieces of the Red Queen? Play it on Steam ♥ Watch the Trailer P.S. Who is a Red Queen is a dark fantasy game. There are 2d depictions of blood, gore, dismembered body parts, as well as written descriptions of the above. A full list of content warnings can be found on the game’s page. The post Who is the Red Queen is out now on Steam! appeared first on Studio Élan.

As we mentioned at the beginning of August, Who is the Red Queen? will be releasing on Steam later this month- and now, we have a date for you all! Join Alice on her adventure to a not quite right Wonderland on August 15th. Who is the Red Queen? is a horror fantasy lesbian visual novel developed by 4noki & co. that follows Alice falling into a strange and familiar Wonderland in search for the Red Queen’s missing pieces. As our third Bellhouse title, we’re excited to bring this to Steam next Monday! The game features over 30,000 words and has 3 major endings… with plenty of dead ends, of course. If you’ve already played the game jam version from itch.io, don’t worry- this is an updated version with new art, music, an updated script, and a Spanish translation! Can you find all of the dismembered pieces of the Red Queen? P.S. Who is a Red Queen is a dark fantasy game. There is 2d depictions of blood, gore, dismembered body parts, as well as written descriptions of the above. A full list of content warnings can be found on the game’s page. The post Who is the Red Queen is coming to Steam on August 15th! appeared first on Studio Élan.

Who is the Red Queen? is a horror fantasy lesbian visual novel that follows Alice falling into a strange and familiar Wonderland in search for the Red Queen’s missing pieces. This is our third Bellhouse title, our publishing branch for WLW and LGBT+ games we did not develop but think are cool and should reach more people! The game features over 30,000 words and has 3 major endings… with plenty of dead ends, of course. If you’ve already played the game jam version from itch.io, don’t worry- this is an updated version with new art, music, an updated script, and a Spanish translation! Can you find all of the dismembered pieces of the Red Queen? Can you find out what has brought Alice into a Wonderland that is not quite right? Wishlist it on Steam ♥ Watch the Trailer Note: Who is a Red Queen is a dark fantasy game. There is 2d depictions of blood, gore, dismembered body parts, as well as written descriptions of the above. The post Who is the Red Queen will release on Steam later this month! appeared first on Studio Élan.

On May 14th, we hosted the Élan Festival, a streamed event on our YouTube channel celebrating and announcing upcoming LGBT+ games! Here's a recap. The post Élan Festival Recap appeared first on Studio Élan.

Hello everyone, and happy new year! There’s still a few more hours before it rolls over here on the west coast of the US, but we know several of you are already living in the future. No matter what kind of year you’ve had, we hope your 2022 is even better. We don’t have a big blog post this year, although we do have some quick personal messages from a few of our members. We do want to thank you all for another year of support, and hope that you’ll join us for what should be a very busy 2022. We’ll have a lot more news to share in February or March, as part of a special event we’re planning. More on that later, though. For now, the first message we’d like to share is an important one from Theo Minute, one of our founding members. Happy New Year! 2021 is finally over, and with 2022 I’m sending all my good vibes to every person reading this. I have passed every day hoping for the next one to be better, and my resolution this year is to take some time to enjoy each day as it is and enjoy it whenever I can. As of this new year, I’ve decided to step back from Studio Élan and many of my responsibilities – I hope this decision truly, genuinely will be a good one! Thank you to every one of my friends here in the studio for their friendship, support, and understanding. I love you all. Please Be Happy, Summer at the Edge of the Universe, and Lock and Key are shaping up to be such incredibly special games and I feel so lucky to have been able to contribute to them. I hope with this decision, the team will be able to restructure and fill out the roles I’ve had, and each game will be able to flourish and bloom even faster. I’ll be focusing on smaller projects and responsibilities for a while, but mostly I’ll be taking a lot of time to spend with my family, find my creative voice again, and continue supporting the amazing projects everyone here is working on. (And I’ll still be around of course!) Take care everyone! I hope your year is as amazing as you all are. All of us at Studio Élan want to express our gratitude for everything that Theo has done for us, and wish them all the best. We love you, Theo. There are a couple messages from some of our other members, just below. Thank you for reading, and one last time, happy new year! * * * Another year gone by, huh…as it was for so many others, 2021 was a really tough year for me and my loved ones. But through it all, my fellow elan teammates and friends had my back every step of the way. I’m so grateful to be a part of this team and can’t wait to share some of the hard work we’ve been doing on Lock and Key this year with all of you! Here’s to a new year filled with happiness, with warmth, and most of all, with magic. Happy New Year! – Rachel 2021 has been a year of ups and downs, and I’d be lying to say it was more up than down. However, through it all, there’s been a lot of good things that have happened and more than ever, I find myself grateful for what I have in life. Thank you for sticking by us through the good times and bad, and I hope that 2022 will be our best year yet. – Josh If nothing else, the year end write-up is a Elan tradition, isn’t it? It’s been a year, and somehow we reached the end of it. It’s been a year of new beginnings and sudden endings, and it hasn’t been easy, but it was a busy year. Heart of the Woods came out on the switch, Highway Blossoms had an official vinyl release, and we also released the Please Be Happy demo! Unfortunately, it was another year of not releasing Please Be Happy, and as director I genuinely want to apologize for that. We’ll keep working hard and next year for sure! Happy New Year, everyone, and here’s to a good year! – adirosa The post Happy New Year 2022 appeared first on Studio Élan.

It goes without saying that 2020 was a hell of a year. We had a lot of cool plans fall through because of Everything Going On, but still managed to accomplish a lot. Every year when I sit down to write these posts and reflect on what we’ve done, I’m a little surprised. It ends up being more than I expected, and this year has been no exception, especially given the circumstances. Our biggest release of the year was Highway Blossoms: Next Exit. What originally started as a short side story ended up being the length of a full game, and set a new standard for the series as a whole. Will there be more of Amber and Marina’s (and Cassi and the Trio’s) story to come? We don’t really know yet. Either way, this little roadtrip has been a journey for us as much as the characters, and we’re glad to have taken it. We also launched our new Bellhouse publishing wing and put out two great titles through it already. Both Without a Voice and First Snow have been very well-received. It’s nice to see that you guys liked these stories as much as we did, which is why we wanted to help share them with the world. We’ll be publishing more Bellhouse titles in the future! Our first game as a full studio, Heart of the Woods, got a major upgrade with the voice acting patch that came out over the summer. We worked with an amazing cast to bring our girls to life, and we still can’t shut up about how happy we are with the results. Alongside that, we released I Told You So! a free and dubiously canon spinoff to HotW. While we didn’t manage to release the Nintendo Switch port for the game this year like we’d hoped,that’ll still be coming soon. We’re just as excited to get our hands on the Switch version as y’all are. On Patreon, we’re coming to the end of Celeste Academy, and soon Carida will discover who her true love is. We also announced and have released a few chapters of two upcoming light novels (well, I guess they’re webnovels for now): Cherry’s Story, the first entry in our Celestaria Records collection, which is the same universe and setting as Celeste Academy. There’s also Honorine’s Run to Save the World, an adventure story by our newest writer. Looking towards the future, we also announced two future titles. Please Be Happy will be our next game to come out. We’d been aiming to release it this year, but uh, that’s not gonna happen. PBH is a slice-of-life story about a very special fox, set in a slightly magical version of Wellington, New Zealand. Summer at the Edge of the Universe, a solarpunk game, is the other one we announced. It’s full of good vibes as Summer and her friends reunite and go on a journey around, well, the universe. We started this one with the concept of “what if Yuru Camp, but in space” and it’s grown a lot since then. Those two games join Lock and Key, which we first announced just a little over a year ago, on our “upcoming” list. As you can see, we have a lot of stuff in the works, even more than just those three games, in fact. Not all of these titles are slated to come out next year, but we’re hoping to have more than one release. We’re not letting the disappointment that 2020 turned out to be stop us from dreaming big for 2021. Those big plans that fell through didn’t get cancelled, we only set them aside for the time being. We’ve got a lot to look forward to next year, and as always, we’re super grateful to everyone who’s been supporting us along the way. Just below, there’s a few messages from some of our team members. On behalf of everyone here at Studio Élan, we wish you a very happy new year 🎉 P.S. Happy birthday Maddie! Hey everyone, it’s adi! First of all go give yourself a pat on your back. If you have friends let them give you a pat on the back too (even if it’s metaphorical or through the internet.) You got through this year! And hey – we did too. I mean this in total, absolute seriousness – we got through this year because of you all, too. Thank you. It’s been a wild time… and filled with so much stuff. We’ve been pretty busy this year! Remember the announcement of Summer At the Edge of the Universe? This year! Heart of the Woods with VOICES? This year too! Highway Blossoms: Next Exit – also this year! 2020 feels fake sometimes, and time really is a human concept wibbly-wobbly but we did our best. Take your time to really reflect on everything you accomplished… At first, it might feel like a whole lot of nothing. It does for me when I don’t think too hard. But this isn’t nothing. We’ve all at least gone through the herculean effort of making it through this year, anything on top of that is amazing. Thanks for sticking around, I’ll continue to do my best (and hopefully deliver Please Be Happy next year)! See y’all in 2021. – adirosa Hello friends! Rachel here to wish you a happy new year and a positive 2021! This was one hell of a year, but you made it. Mazel tov! Despite all the chaos of 2020, it was also a year of excitement for our studio. New announcements, new updates, new releases…and all of it made possible by your support! You kept us all writing, drawing, designing, programming, making music, and more! I know I already said a bunch about this in my year-end Lock and Key post, but I want to once again say how much I love all of you and how much you inspire us every day. And we won’t be stopping any time soon! So once again, thank you. From the bottom of my heart. Let’s make 2021 MAGICAL! – Rachel Hi, it’s Adri, and… wow, end-of-year retrospectives. This is the third time I’m writing something of the sort for Élan, but this time it feels more of a formality than tending to the important task of yearly reflection. If anything, 2020 was THE year of retrospective & reflection (among a myriad of other choice nouns, I’d bet), given that this year, pretty much everyone had to rethink and reevaluate how they went about pretty much everything. We’ve had people writing retrospectives about 2020 since as early as May, probably. If you’re half as plugged in as I am, you’ve probably already had your fill of retrospectives on 2020. Eh, one more couldn’t hurt. Studio Élan already works remotely, as we’ve got team members from New York to New Zealand, so when it comes to working together as a studio, not much really changed. We shipped a bunch of cool stuff this year (as adi has mentioned already), and we also stepped out a bit with the introduction of Bellhouse and publishing titles like Without a Voice and First Snow. We also branched out with other content like Celestaria Records, Cherry’s Story, & Honorine’s Run To Save The World. It certainly hasn’t been an empty year for us! That being said, it wouldn’t exactly be true to say that means we’ve been wholly unaffected by, er, events. Nothing, nor anyone, exists in a bubble, and as we are (last I checked) real humans existing in the physical realm, our personal lives have doubtless been tossed here and there just as much as yours probably has. However, we’re still here. That’s got to count for something. When the clock strikes midnight on January 1st, 2021, it’s not like all of the problems from this year are going to magically go away (just like how you can’t just magically change your lifestyle by just writing down a resolution for the new year). All of the things that are happening right now will continue to happen. However, even with all of the bad carrying over, we’re taking all of the good from 2020 with us, too. That includes all of the progress we’ve made, all the things we’ve learned, all the ways we’ve grown, and all of the things we’ve started and we’re still working on. This year, we’ve committed ourselves to making sure we take two steps forward for every step backward. For all of the things that have made this year tougher, your continued support has made it that much easier. If we could help you find peace, joy, safety, or whatever positive state of mind you’d like in one of our stories this year, then we’re glad. We might not have been able to vanquish the struggles of this past year, but, at the very least, we hope we could find a way to give you a reason to smile. Here’s to more smiles in 2021. – Adri When I started Studio Élan, it was with the plan of waiting 5 years and seeing how things turned out at the end of that. As we head into the beginning of our fifth year as a studio now, I have to say, I’m feeling pretty optimistic. I’m extremely proud of what we’ve already created with HotW and HB and everything else, but I find myself even more excited what for what comes next. Thanks for being a part of our year, through both the good and the bad. Here’s to a better, brighter 2021, and many more years beyond that. – Josh Meowdy there, it’s Miko. September was my one year anniversary here at Élan, and it’s been a wild and fun ride the entire time. Like Adri said, we all work remotely so not much changed for us studio-wise, but rather in our personal lives. It’s been a rough year for some of us and our friends, but there is some nice closure in the year being over- I’ve always been the type to be hopeful and set New Years Resolutions, even though nothing is really “changing” aside from the calendar date. But the mindset is what I think is important- if you want to change something, do it. Make small steps towards that, and keep moving forward. Every day we wake up is a new chance to try something new, to become a better person, and I look forward to that. Visual novels are something I hold near and dear to my heart, so I’m so excited to share with you all what the team has been working on next year. Thank you for being a part of this journey with us, and please keep moving forward with us. — Miko It’s exciting to look forward to the new year. While setting resolutions isn’t my cup of tea, my favorite part of this change of the year making a small promise to do my best in the coming 365 days. I’ve struggled a lot in 2020 (as so many of us have), and while 2021 isn’t going to magically leave every problem behind, I hope you can find it in yourself to be hopeful for the future with me. Thank you always for supporting us here in Studio Élan, take care, and be kind to yourself. – minute Hi, it’s Stella, 19, and this is my first time writing one of these! 2020 has been a huge year for us at Studio Élan in ways everyone else has already talked about, and I get the feeling 2021 will be much the same; there’s plenty of exciting stuff going on—some of which I’m contributing to!—and I simply cannot wait for you all to see what we’ve got in store. I… don’t really have any more to say than this that hasn’t already been said but thank you for sticking with us so far, and I’m confident you’ll find us just as worthy of... The post Happy New Year 2021! appeared first on Studio Élan.