Alpha Preview Update (September)

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Password: cider_and_straw

Bug Reports

Incomplete Routes

Shepherds of Haven Development Log

Content Added: 

• 20,000 words of new content

• Ascendancy Festival - Chase route

• Chase, Trouble, and Blade's festival souvenirs added to room decor

Changelog:

Critical Fixes

• Fixed a bug in the quickbuild that reset Chase and Tallys's romance flags to 20 if you selected an FWB relationship with them.

• Fixed a bug in the quickbuild that caused the main menu music to loop over and over (oops lol).

Miscellaneous Notes: 

• Leaving Chandry's play early during the Ascendancy Festival is still incomplete.

• Blade's festival souvenir might show up regardless if you went with him to the festival: this should resolve whenever you start a new file from scratch.

• Through my own testing with the quickbuild, I've noticed that setting player stats (like Nerves of Steel) to 90 or above during the Ascendancy Festival will cause those stats to drop drastically the next time they're supposed to get a bump, due to the cap built in to that chapter. If you're using the quickbuild, I'd recommend setting player stats to 80 or lower to avoid this behavior. This is just a QOL tip to make quickbuild playthroughs easier!

Notes

Hiya, everyone! Well, here it is... Chase's festival interlude. The first thing I have to note is that this is the first festival interlude that "breaks" the pattern we've seen so far: not all romances proceed at the same pace, so not all characters will confess at the Ascendancy Festival like Blade and Trouble did--so if you're expecting Chase to follow that convention, I'm just letting you know now that it doesn't happen like that! I just wanted to state that ahead of time so that no one is disappointed! Again, not all characters will confess at the Ascendancy Festival--all of their routes are individually paced and have to proceed in accordance with their personalities and character arcs!

That being said, Chase and MC are unrepentantly horny, lovey-dovey, and feral in this interlude, which I was somewhat surprised by... I had a hard time wrangling them so the story could proceed, because apparently they just want to rip each other's clothes off all the time, lmao. But also Chase really got put through the wringer in this one LOL. I hope you guys enjoy this update, because I think it's a juicy one!

This month was another crazy one for me, but in a good way: I think this is the most writing I've done in a short period of time, ever! Not only was I working on this beast of an update, but I had a HUGE breakthrough with my novel. I've been tearing my hair out and was sometimes literally in tears because I kept watching the wordcount creep up (this last zero draft was, I kid you not, 115,000 words) and I wasn't even through 40% of the planned story yet... and that was only for Book 1! I was in despair of ever getting through the massively unwieldy planned trilogy, especially because I only had the vaguest ideas of where Book 2 and 3 were going to go... But some prescient talks with my fiance (also my principal and sole beta reader) led to some very exciting revelations, which allows me to break the series up into more manageable volumes. This proved extremely invigorating--it means I'm hopeful of finishing Book 1 sometime sooner rather than later--so I was hard at work on rehauling that draft into a new book these past few weeks as well.

Then I got a series of calls that asked me to tackle a different creative project on very short notice, which I managed to do over that same weekend. All in all, I think I must have written 50,000 words in the past 9 days LOL. Plus we knocked out a bunch of wedding stuff in between, too! All good stuff that leaves me feeling very productive.

(Thank you too, to everyone who left such kind messages last month. Even when things felt low, your compassion and grace meant the world, and helped get me into a much better state this month!)

That's all I've got for now! I believe we're due for Red's room concept art soon, and I've also commissioned an artist to do a very pretty series of postcards featuring locations around Blest, for those in the Vice-Commander tiers and higher to start receiving in the mail once they get to that point! :) And of course, we'll have to commence with our next poll to see what our next community art commission will be, too!

I hope you all are enjoying this start of autumn, and I very much hope you enjoy the update!

What’s Next:

As always, it could be the next festival interlude, it could be another character interlude, or it could be the start of Chapter 10! I know I keep saying that last one, but I just never know what I'm going to do until I sit down to write it, lol!

Estimated total wordcount: 1,368,000 words