Alpha Preview Update (December)

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Incomplete Routes

Shepherds of Haven Development Log

Content Added:

• 8,000 words of new content

• Chapter 10 continues, stressing everyone out, including me

• Quickbuild updated

  • You can now toggle being in an official (post-confession) relationship with an RO in the quickbuild. This shouldn't really affect anything except for late-game (post-Chapter 8) content, but use at your own risk: it could still make things go wonky in random places, so use responsibly!

  • You can now also jump straight to Chapter 10 (technically 11) from the quickbuild, though I haven't added major decisions from Chapter 9 yet.

Notes

Hello everybody! Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a Happy New Year to you all!

I'd have liked for this update to be a bit longer, but a lot of factors converged this month to prevent that from happening: our March wedding draws near, so there was a lot to do for that, plus a sudden flurry of urgent work and meetings on the author side of my job (all good stuff, just busy), plus a little manuscript work, and then I also finally managed to hack together a working UI for Haven University! And then there was boring tax stuff for the studio that had to be done before the end of the year, and then of course, the actual holidays. We flew out to an Airbnb outside of San Francisco for a big Christmas gathering consisting of my fiance's large family and their three dogs, and since it was right on the beach, I had intended to do a little more work on Shepherds, pretending I was on some writer's retreat in a quaint house on the blustery Pacific coast... And, well, as the saying goes, "We make plans; God laughs." The signal and internet was already really bad, since it was a fairly remote area, but then a big storm hit the region and knocked out our power for nearly three days! And since everything was closed, that meant we spent Christmas Day in the dark, with only a sad duck lamp (like literally sad) that I brought for a White Elephant gag gift exchange and five candles we managed to snag at the local corner store (bless them for opening on Christmas and while their power was out) as our only source of light!

(Not joking, this is literally what I stared at for over 8 hours that night.)

Truthfully, my fiance and I loved it, as it was an exciting and novel and somewhat romantic experience for two writers, getting to spend Christmas in the dark in a strange house with loved ones (I guess that's not romantic. It was more like I was picturing Mary Shelley and her loved ones being holed up in a castle during the Year Without Summer, the sun blocked out by volcanic ash, telling scary stories to amuse themselves because there was nothing else to do and coming up with Frankenstein and et al. We like telling scary stories.). And I often love the idea of going off-the-grid! But others were not quite as thrilled to be without electricity, signal, hot water, heat, or food LOL.

Aaaaanyway, the point is, my good intentions for getting a little more writing done on the update were thwarted by all of these circumstances!

The coding is also going to get enormously complex as we head into the end stages of the game, as a lot of earlier decisions and choices start to have their consequences known, so the prose and writing side of things was also weighed down by that. Also just dread. My tummy hurt a lot as I tried to force myself to write this next part. I really don't want to write the bad stuff... 🥹 It's stressing me out!! My babies!! I'll do what must be done, but maybe next time I'll refresh myself with Red's Ascendancy Festival, I've been having dreams about it lately and I need a little lightness again and also every confession makes the later stuff hurt so good--

As I said, I also finally got the Haven University engine up and running! That sounds easy when written as a single sentence like that, but it actually took several days of hair-pulling, it was genuinely awful. Coding is hell. I hate it so much. And it's been a long time since I've had to start from scratch like that! But at least there's a base UI now, and I can build on that as I add the more advanced features and then actually port over the game! The text will probably undergo some rewrites, as I'm picturing it more as a moody dark academia game now rather than the perky RA-RA GO STATE U FRAT aesthetic it had before; I think it's going to be luscious and dark and will probably incorporate some mystery/thriller/horror elements in later sections, while still maintaining the fun of having these characters in a more modern setting. I think it's going to be a ton of fun!

Oh yeah, and I managed to get a phone text messaging system working!!

(Not the final look, just a prototype to test the system out first!)

That's all I've got for now: I very much hope you enjoy, and a very happy New Year to you all! May 2026 be full of love, light, joy, and hope for us all! 🥹❤️🎊

Estimated total wordcount: 1,400,000 words