Please Be Happy News

Hello, everyone!

Thank you everyone so much for the love and support for our game over the years.

We're so happy to announce that there are now Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean translations for the demo of Please Be Happy — that's the entirety of the first chapter!

We are looking into options to bring the full game into these languages as well, but due to various circumstances, there are no current active plans to do so. We haven't given up though, and we wanted to bring a little bit of PBH into these languages, especially to see if there is interest in these and if we should pursue this further via crowdfunding.

An incredible thank you to all of our translators who have worked hard and waited patiently for these translations.

Simplified Chinese Translation
Provided by Hakui Team
Translation: Yuan, Rena, DF, Rain, X, Alwaysmadowl, Hanasaki
Testing: Alwaysmadowl, Yuan, KuromitsuDango, Litha

Korean Translation by KyleHeren

Additionally, while the contents of the game are identical to previous versions, the game engine itself has undergone massive (over 662!) technical changes, with most of the internals almost fully rewritten in order to better support translations going forward, as well as fixing quite a large number of issues.

The full changelog for this update will be made available in a few hours.

As always, thank you for continuing to support Studio Élan!

〜 adirosa and Karen/あけみ (akemin_dayo)

P.S. Our next games are available for wishlisting - if you want a thrilling dark tale by many of the staff behind Please Be Happy, please consider checking out and wishlisting A Tithe in Blood! If you want a heartwarming tale of adventure and love, please check out Upwards, Rain! Both releasing this summer!!!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2989270/A_Tithe_in_Blood/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3449030/Upwards_Rain_The_Post_Office_of_Farewells/

The Storyteller's Festival is happening now! This is a week-long Steam festival focused on visual novels and other story-driven games. There's over 400 games in the event—including a few of ours!



Here's a few of our other LGBT+ yuri titles that are in the festival—give them a wishlist or check out their demos if you'd like to support us!

Summer at the Edge of the Universe is an LGBT+ yuri solarpunk adventure about the trip of a lifetime through the cosmos.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2641720/Summer_at_the_Edge_of_the_Universe/

A Tithe in Blood is a dark yuri romance story about modern magic mixing with old mysteries.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2989270/A_Tithe_in_Blood/

Lock & Key: A Magical Girl Mystery is a mystery yuri visual novel about magical girls solving one last crime before their powers go away for good.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1803850/Lock__Key_A_Magical_Girl_Mystery/

Our Home, My Keeper is a slice-of-life yuri romance about a burnt out writer and a fairy who might just help her out.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3092190/Our_Home_My_Keeper/

Twofold is an LGBT+ romance about a struggling nonbinary college student and the women who help them pass—but need help of their own.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1749770/Twofold/

We're also teaming up with several other visual novel developers to share the wide world of visual novels in the festival!

• Of Sense and Soul by Forsythia Productions
  
• Asphodelium by Crystal Game Works
  
• Imperial Grace by Synstoria
  
• Summer at the Edge of the Universe by Studio Élan
  
• A Tithe in Blood by Studio Élan
  
• Reanimation Scheme by Wind Chimes Games
  
• Emberfate by Wind Chimes Games
  

• Fearbonding by Night Asobu
  
• Reanimation Scheme by Wind Chimes Games
  
• Lock and Key: A Magical Girl Mystery by Studio Élan
  
• Crimson Waves on the Emerald Sea: Amaranthine Moon by Crystal Game Works
  

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Today, 2 years ago, we welcomed everyone to our fantasy version of Wellington, New Zealand. It's hard to believe it's already been 2 whole years since then, but here we are!

First off, here's a new illustration of Aspen by adirosa, to fit with the Miho she drew last year!



As previously announced, Please Be Happy is coming to consoles!

The console ports are going well, with a few having recently passed some critical checks. It takes a long time to make sure they're all working properly, so we still don't have a release date locked down, but the console ports for Please Be Happy should be ready sometime early next year.

You can see a few more updates (and artworks) for Please Be Happy in our anniversary post!

Thank you for all the continued support!

p.s. if you want some Please Be Happy merch, we'll be having a Black Friday sale next week~ follow our newsletter or Discord to see when it goes live!

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Today, August 15th, is Miho's birthday! To celebrate, here's a new artwork of her by adirosa.



The higher resolution version of this artwork is available here.

Please Be Happy is taking part in the Wholesome Games Steam Celebration, a festival for comfy and wholesome games here on Steam. It's currently on sale for the event.



Our other games Twofold and our upcoming title Summer at the Edge of the Universe are also taking part! They both have demos out that you can play.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1749770/Twofold/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2641720/Summer_at_the_Edge_of_the_Universe/

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Hello, everyone!

Please Be Happy 1.2 has just been released, which fixes a few issues and makes various user experience and performance improvements.

Not too much has changed on the surface, but the game has undergone significant technical changes internally in 1.2 for a better experience now and into the future.

As always, thank you for continuing to support Studio Élan!

〜 Karen/あけみ (akemin_dayo) and adirosa

[h2]Changelog for 1.2:[/h2]
On PC, it targets Unity SDK version 2021.3.33f1.

• Improved ED video and audio quality.
  
• Made further improvements to general performance.
  
• Made improvements to the Episode Replay feature.
  
• The current version of the game is now shown at the top-left corner of the main menu.
  
• The main menu can now always be closed in every context (as opposed to only when ingame) using Escape, Right Click (MOUSE2), or the configured cancel button on a controller.
  
• The quick menu can now be shown and hidden using Backspace or R3 on a controller.
  
• The CG gallery viewer can now be controlled using a keyboard or controller.
  
  
  
  • Escape (keyboard) or the configured cancel button (controller) closes the CG viewer.
    
  • H (keyboard) or Triangle / Top Button (controller) hides the UI.
    
  • [ ] (keyboard) or L1 and R1 (controller) flips between pages, if applicable.
    
• Fixed an issue where the Extras → Gallery screen would sometimes show the contents of the Credits screen instead, if a very specific set of steps were taken.
  
• Fixed some minor UI layout issues.
  
• Worked around a Unity bug that would cause the game to run locked at 30 FPS on certain system configurations.
  
• Worked around a Unity bug that causes VSync to sometimes become momentarily disabled under certain circumstances, resulting in a spike of elevated GPU utilisation as a result of drawing frames at over 5000(!) FPS for a brief period of time.
  

[h3]Very technical information for modders, dataminers, and anyone else who may be interested[/h3]

• Scene scripts are currently still left in serialised binary format. This will change in a future update.
  
• A new preferences file was added: ${Unity persistent data path}/com.vnstudioelan.pleasebehappy.json
  
• PBH 1.2 is the largest update so far in terms of the number of non-external-user-facing internal changes — large portions of the code have been rewritten and/or refactored, and a whole lot of new code was written, too. Additionally, 1.2 also finished porting over everything that's useful in Unity / C# from the shared Python codebase used by our Ren'Py games.
  
• Much like Ren'Py, you can now call arbitrary method selectors using the developer console command

  @performSelector ExampleClass.exampleMethod withArgs:"optionalExample1","example2"

  
  
  • Shorthand form is

    @p a:

    
    
  • (※ This is mostly only useful for testing purposes during development, and is also far less powerful than its Ren'Py counterpart. Any relevant output is written to Player.log.)
    
• Some of you may have noticed that partial controller support was quietly added in 1.1.2. Please note that UI menus are still not yet navigable using a keyboard or controller.
  
• While support for controller prompts in the UI (including in the help screen) has been added, it is not yet exposed as a user-facing option, and currently requires a restart of the game to take effect if manually enabled either via editing the preference file mentioned above, or via the developer console.
  
  
  
  • This also applies to the confirmation button preference, which is currently not functional beyond just affecting the controller prompts UI.