Alpha Preview Update (December) (Patreon)

Play the alpha here

Password: midnight_madness ⬅ ❗️don't forget the underscore :)

Report bugs here

View bug reports here

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

What's New:

• 15,000 words of new content to Chapter 8
• The first trial of the Crystal Tournament
• Sexual tension if you're romancing Shery or Riel
• Everyone slowly becoming more unhinged and feral
• Pluck grass with Mimir

Developer's Notes:

Hi everyone, I hope you're having a very happy holiday season as 2022 draws to a close! I've been having a great time, spending time with friends and family and cheerfully eating a really horrific diet (so many sweets......). Writing-wise, it was a bit of a rough month for me, what with the back-to-back holidays, dividing time between my partner's family and my own, visiting relatives and having relatives and friends come into town and visit, scrambling to get Christmas shopping and other necessary tasks done on time, and (not as fun) an unexpected midnight trip to the ER... (Not for me, and everyone's 100% fine, so no worries--just threw the whole work schedule for a complete loop for a week, since we ended up getting home around 8 AM and ended up sleeping until 4 PM! Very disorientating for a few days...) 

Despite all that, I'm proud of how much I managed to add to the update: we started and finished the first trial of the labyrinth in one fell swoop, and now we're moving briskly right along onto the second one!

However, all of the above means that I was not able to get the short story for the month (the update for Some Kind of Virus) finished on time. :( I'm trying to cut myself some slack because it's the holidays and I do want to take the time to relax and have some time to myself instead of stressing out about it, but I always feel really bad whenever this happens!! I'm very sorry and I hope you understand! 🙏 Medical emergencies are never fun, but I am grateful that nothing worse than a delay in the short story happened, so in a way, it's a positive thing rather than a negative. I will definitely be able to post the chapter next month, and hopefully we'll be able to get to some twists in the story that will make it all worth it! XD

Not much else to say for this alpha build update, it's pretty straightforward--other than that there is some violence and gore in certain routes, so please be aware of that. If you have trouble visualizing the [spoilers] Nemek [/spoilers], you can see them in this codex entry I posted in October here!

I think that's about all I have for you this time! Although it is the holidays, the music, Twine conversion, and UI work on the game has been progressing nicely, and we just finished the interface for Chandry's shop! He's so cute I want to cry! It won't be too much longer before the UI framework for everything is completely done, and same with the porting of the actual code--we're all the way up to confronting Thurl in Chapter 7, which only leaves Chapter 8 and the day off scenes until everything has been fully converted over! 👀 Once both the code conversion and work on the UI are officially complete, I'll have to set aside time to go through everything with a fine-toothed comb and hunt for both bugs and places to spruce up the prose and grammar a bit, so there's still a ways to go--but I'm very proud of the rapid progress we've made so far!

Okay, that's all! Again, I'm wishing all of you a very happy holiday season, from the bottom of my heart. Not counting the work I did on Twine, I added 200,000 words to the base game , just as I did last year, and that's thanks to you and your support; I couldn't have made such enormous progress on Shepherds if it wasn't thanks to all of you! Seriously, I'm literally not sure if making this game would even be possible without you. So thank you. Thank you for your patience, for your kindness and enthusiasm, for your encouragement and support, for your fun inside jokes and love of the characters and fan creations and comments and headcanons and questions and everything you do and contribute to this game and its community. I am so grateful to you all, and so awed by how much we've managed to accomplish in the past few years. I never would have imagined I'd be in the position I am now, and it's thanks to your generosity and encouragement: because of you and your support, I get to write and create to my heart's content, and live out the dreams I entertained when I first started writing Shepherds as a little girl!

Thank you. I hope you all have a wonderful end to 2022, and here's to a new year and an exciting new chapter for us all!

Total wordcount: 899,860 words without code

What's Next

How many shots do you think the team should take? Things are about to get so sloppy... it's like the Hunger Games, except everyone's going to be wasted 😭 I'm almost certain dark Shery is going to come out. I'm wondering if there will be time for drunk snogging???