Back from Vacation!

Hi everybody, I just wanted to pop in and give a quick update on how things are looking! I just got back to the states the day before yesterday: my family took my fiance and I along with them on a trip to Taipei, Bali, and Sydney over the last few weeks, which was a very fun time and a break that I desperately needed. I even got some architectural inspiration for my current book as well as for Shepherds, as the village of Jiufen looks a bit how I always imagined parts of Ygrath!

(I think Ygrath is rather more stolid and austere in its own elegant way rather than having these cheery red lanterns everywhere, but hopefully you get the idea!)

Also, this trip solidified my conviction that Halek's daemon/banner animal whould be a koala. There's something about them that's so haggard:

Anyway, it's good to be back! The jetlag and trying to get my sleep schedule back on track has been a killer, though, so I'm still trying to adjust!

Where we're at with Shepherds:

• I'm hoping that this is the last month I'll have to spend time converting content from the ChoiceScript build of the game: if I can settle in quickly and hunker down, I should be able to get the rest of Chapter 9 done this month. If not--since I am working with a week of the month already gone, and I've got wedding tastings and consultations and meetings to tackle every day this week--then definitely next month. That will wipe a huge chunk of standing work off of my plate and will have its own cascading effect on the months to come, including freeing me up (mentally and physically) to resume work on my book, which has been on hold since Dashingdon went down (☹️) as well giving me time to stabilize other things that have fallen through the cracks!

• If that pans out, I'd like to do a Q&A next month! Even though I scaled it back to a quarterly thing, I really didn't intend to go this long without doing one: again, Dashingdon unexpectedly going down in the end of January really threw a wrench in everything! But hopefully next month we can squeeze one in!

• I think we've made a big breakthrough in solving the lag problem that some users have noticed, especially on Google Chrome. I hired an outside programmer to do an small audit of a few key issues, and it's taken a bit to get him up to speed and familiarized with how the Twine build works, but I'm hopeful that he's identified a fix on how to solve/reduce the pesky problem of lag. I still need to test that out myself, then roll it out to you guys in this month's update, and if it doesn't completely break more things, that will be a huge relief! I'm also hopeful we can fix an issue that some Samsung mobile users have noticed, wherein their game only opens in landscape mode while on mobile: I think it's an issue with how certain mobile browsers--seems like Brave or Chromium-based browsers?--interact with the fullscreen function on those specific phones, so we'll see if that's in our control to resolve or not.

• If all goes well with that this month, then I'd like to take advantage of resolving those issues by rolling out the public demo version of the game sometime in July! Fingers crossed!

• Unfortunately, we missed the goody (Tallys's room art) for last month due to conflicts in the artist's schedule, but it's finished now: I'll be posting that ASAP, and hopefully we can start and finish the next room in time to count for this month!

That's all I have for you right now! Thanks everyone for your patience and support as always, and you'll see me around a bit more as I get some housekeeping done!