Alpha Preview Update (March)

Hi, everybody! Coming in at the eleventh hour is the latest update to the alpha build, featuring a mess of bug fixes, a new Red interlude, and the rest of Chapter 8's conversion to Twine!

Play here

Password: bread_and_twine

Bug reports

Incomplete Routes

After realizing that none of you could see the devlogs I was leaving on itch.io, due to a (in my opinion) somewhat silly rule that prevents password-protected games from having viewable devlogs, I've decided to stick all of my records of bug fixes, changelogs, and other technical info in a Google Doc for now, separated by dated entries. There's probably some better and more efficient way of doing it (and if you know of one, please do let me know!), but for now, please be sure to give that document a read for more info on what this update entails, especially if you have questions or bugs you're not sure have been addressed yet. In the last two days, I've addressed somewhere around 150 bug reports (a massive THANK YOU to everyone who so helpfully reports these, gives context and screenshots, and even offers what they think is going on: you are literal angels granting life to this solo game dev!!!!), though there are still about a dozen or so that I haven't been able to address yet!

Shepherds of Haven Development Log

Today's Entry

Other than that: Red!!! New interlude! He's so... gestures expansively I think Redmancers will have a lot of fun with this one, as it's the one right before Wallmire, and you can see the wheels starting to turn in his mind, lol... We are getting very close to being ready to start the festival dates, to be sure!

I'm in a mad, helter-skelter rush to also update the monthly short story in the next few minutes, so I won't have time to linger here and talk about what a crazy crunch this month has been. In Neanderthal terms: Me thought finishing Twine meant no more stress, because me not doing ChoiceScript and Twine at same time any more. Me wrong. Take longer! Because me have to still convert old chapters to Twine, plus work on new content for update, plus address many bug that come from release, plus test new content and converted content for bugs myself before release. Also family come to house to visit and stay this month. Twice! Two different weeks! Also more birthday things (fun) and also wedding things (starting to become less fun) and also book things, both writing the book again (I added 9,000 words lol) and other author stuff that suddenly exploded in urgency again. All good things, amazing things really, but there's also just...

gestures expansively 

Okay, sorry, I guess I'm not too much of a chatterbox to be a convincing Neanderthal. Anyway, yes, sometimes it feels like the world is on fire, so it feels harder to tackle the massive teetering piles of "to-do" stuff I have going on at any given time and not feel completely overwhelmed. 💀 It's like, really great things are happening in my personal life, but also some stressful things, and sometimes the stressful things eclipse the great things or make them feel like more stressful things because of my state of mind at the current moment. But I'm aware of it and I'm working on it! I'm hoping the overall process will continue to smooth out and that I'll be able to get a firmer handle on things as time goes on and things continue to settle from the sudden shakeup that Dashingdon's abrupt closure represented!

In other news, I'm afraid that the person working on Chase's room concept hasn't gotten back to me in almost two months. :( That piece was almost finished, and I don't know yet if it will be finished by that same artist or if I'll have to find someone to either finish what was done or start over from scratch, but that's why I wasn't able to upload it this month! In better news, I was able to contact two artists who have the same style, and they're working on the next rooms now (Blade and Tallys: they picked). If Chase's room artist never returns, I'll consult with them to see what can be done: rest assured, his room concept art won't be lost!

I think that's all I have for you for now! I'll probably be working on another character interlude and possibly the beginnings of the festival next month; thank you for your understanding as I juggle converting Chapters 8.5 and 9 as well, which will probably preclude me from doing really massive new content updates until that's off my plate. (Still, Red's interlude this month was something like 14,000 words!)

I hope you enjoy!

Estimated total wordcount: 1,255,000 words