Heart of the Woods News

This marks Studio Élan’s first-ever full release as a studio. After releasing our free demo last year, we hope you’ll look forward to experiencing the full version of this thrilling, heartwarming, and utterly enchanting adventure from start to finish. Your feedback on the demo was invaluable, and we put our all into making sure that the final release was as refined and polished as possible.

Thank you all for your continued support. We try to say this as often as we can, but we honestly couldn’t make it this far without all of you. Please enjoy Heart of the Woods, and please look forward to Studio Élan’s continued work in the future!

A full changelog is at the bottom of this post


art by @vividgrim

For the past 3 months, we've been overwhelmed again and again by your love, support, and feedback. Thank you all so much for giving our demo a try; We hope its made you excited for the full game.

We've been working hard to bring the full version out to you all very soon; In the meantime, we've also been working with Indienova, a Chinese translation group. Thanks to them, Version 1.2 now features a full Chinese translation! A big applause to them, and a special shoutout to our GUI artist @adirosette for painstakingly translating/exporting all our GUI to its translated counterpart. Whew!

A couple of backgrounds have been updated too. The pink lake clearing is no longer a placeholder made by our programmer (me), and the church background should look a bit more frosty and touched up.

We've touched up a lot of screens and features to give a smoother experience as well. Even if you can't read Chinese, we hope you'll appreciate the love and effort that went into this translation. And if you're learning the language, be sure to check out the Q. Translate button in the quick menu now! It'll translate your current line right before your very eyes.

Onto the changelog!

Changes

• Menus now have a soft dissolve effect in the main menu
  
• Option to choose your language at the start of the game
  
• A Q. Translate button in the quick menu, to switch between English and Chinese
  
• New Lake Clearing background
  
• Revised Chapel background
  
• Chapter card and Save/Load thumbs have been updated
  

Fixes

• The main menu image shows up properly behind the game menus during the title screen
  
• A few game menu transitions have been fixed
  

As always, thank you for your support. Please let us know if you come across any issues while playing!

A full changelog is at the bottom of this post


First of all, thank you to everyone who has played the demo so far. Your support means the world to us, and your feedback has been extremely helpful.


Also, thank you to all the amazing artists who drew fan-art for us! We're really honored. You should check out more of their art in their respective twitter pages.



by llullabye


by Ringotan


by yoku


We hope this new version will allow the demo to be enjoyed by everyone. We've fixed some big issues (namely, the accessibility options!) and touched up on some little ones, too.
As always, let us know if you have any other questions, comments, concerns, or if you come across any issues! Thank you once again to everyone for your continued support.


Here's a list of changes with this version:

Changes

• Mac and Linux versions are now live!
• New, longer transitions between scenes.
• A small effect has been added to all the sprites when changing expressions.
• The key visual has been updated to a newer version.
• And a few polishing touches have been added on scenes to match the text
  better, make the sound nicer, make sprite movements gentler, etc~

Fixes

• Typpo Typo correction.
• The history screen now starts at the newest entry, instead of the oldest.
• The Music Room has been fixed (Try it out and enjoy the wonderful music!).
• All accessibility options have been vastly improved (Thank you Adi!). There shouldn't be any more issues of text overflow and cutoff.

Once again, thank you all so, so, so much. We couldn't do this without you.