Alpha Preview Update (November)

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Password: seasonofholly ⬅ ❗️

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View bug reports here

Incomplete routes guide ⬅ ❗️please check if you suspect your game ended early :)

What's New:

• 9,000 words of new content!
• Croelle, Sibella de Vespe, and... an item from an earlier chapter that you might have been wondering what to do with? 👀
• A little hint of Prihine at the end if she's alive...
• Play it cool like a courtier or go hogwild like the feral gremlin you've always dreamed of being

Developer's Notes:

Notes for this update: a new permanent variable was added, but I'm not sure if it will require you to restart the game or not in this context. If you get an error, try starting the game from scratch and using the quickbuild to jump to Chapter 9 (which you can do now, though you still can't manually "set" the variables from Chapter 7 and 8 like you can with earlier chapters)--that should fix it!

Anyway, hello, everybody! I hope you had a fun and/or relaxing Thanksgiving, if you're in the US and celebrate, or are otherwise having a great end to your November! Is it starting to get cold for you guys in the Northern Hemisphere yet? We've finally been blessed with some very nice cloudy/rainy days here in the desert, but the general temps are still remaining in the 70s (Fahrenheit), so this is conversely when I emerge from my summer indoor hibernation and do a lot of exercising and walking around outdoors! Our home borders a large stretch of protected land that houses herds of wild horses, so it's been fun going for walks along the neighborhood trails around sunset and espying them from afar. Two have become pretty familiar with us and sometimes approach (in an extremely cautious, roundabout way) to hopefully sniff our hands for fruit, so one could say I am thriving and living out my latent horse girl dreams of yore!

On to this update! It's fairly straightforward (as straightforward as Sun Court shenanigans can get, anyway), though I'm curious what avenues you'll all be pursuing with Sibella de Vespe! I'm having a scream with coding this chapter because, although you can't see it unless you're code-diving, I find Croelle's reactions to stuff endlessly amusing: he goes the exact opposite way of most (good-aligned/Shepherd) characters and approves of actions that most people would find objectively insane, while disapproving of responses you might expect to use to get into his good graces... His stat changes ironically shows a lot of his personality, even though they're hidden from the player at the moment! XD

I'm a bit disappointed with my wordcounts this month, since I can usually squeak out just a bit more if I really push myself, but November was a bit of a wreck in terms of work: starting off the month extremely sick (which took me over a week to get over) and then all of the stuff that accompanies the holidays and visiting friends and relatives hampered my progress a bit. I'd say we'll be back at it next month, but I just looked at my calendar for December and...

The dots represent AT LEAST ONE (though often 2 or 3) social events, work events, or appointments I have scheduled on a given day... 🥹 Help...

This also isn't including Christmas shopping and all that jazz, so I'm going to do my best to keep up with the output next month, but we'll just see what ends up happening as the year closes out! I'll have something, though, as always!

In other news, we're making leaps and bounds with the Twine translation, including coming up with some new script that will make it far easier and faster for me to continue coding in Twine in the future, and I'm slowly getting around to assembling an actual official website for Shepherds et al. With a shiny studio logo and everything! For the, I assume, 12 people who use the direct URL for the blog (shepherdsofhaven.com), that domain will probably end up pointing to the new "official" website once it's up, while the Tumblr blog will get shepherdsofhaven.blog. But that's all mundane housekeeping stuff I'll get into more detail about later, when I actually get all of my ducks in a row!

Finally, the artist who usually does our weapon codexes isn't taking on work for December, so there'll be a new type of goody next month, and Lavinet's lance and saber will go up in January instead. Ivan Duch is also going to resume work on Volume 2 of the Shepherds of Haven soundtrack in January, and mafuriah, one of our wonderful character card artists, is finally going to be starting Riel's tarot card and finishing off the whole set this month! 😍

Total wordcount: 1,047,415 words without code

What's Next:

I'm not sure yet! I'm guessing more of Chapter 9 (at least the Prihine bit), but I might want to take a break before taking the big plunge into the real politicking section of this chapter, so I might turn to the character interludes or even the Ascendancy Festival, as I mentioned last month. Riel, Tallys, Lavinet, Briony, and Halek are overdue for their next interludes, but they're also ironically the characters we've been spending time with the most in these last story missions, and I usually like to use the interludes to check in on characters we haven't hung out with in a while, so we'll see who ends up being next... I might have to spin a little wheel or something!

That's all for now! I hope you enjoy this update, and feel free to leave your thoughts here, on Tumblr, or on Discord! As this month has been all about appreciation and gratitude, I just want to say how thankful I am for everyone here today: THANK YOU for supporting me and Shepherds, for being so brilliant and kind and funny and encouraging, and for everything you do! Happy reading, and have a great start to your December!