Alpha Preview Update (January) (Patreon)

Play the alpha here

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

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View bug reports here

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

What's New:

• Over 15,000 words of new content to Chapter 8
• The second trial of the Crystal Tournament
• Drunken shenanigans
• Very cute scenes if you're close friends with or romancing Shery and Riel

Developer's Notes:

Hi everyone, Happy New Year once again, and Happy Lunar New Year as well! 

This was a pretty standard month for me: I'm very happy with the work I got done on Chapter 8 (that's Trial #2 done and dusted--only Trial #3 next and then we're pretty much 'done' with this half of the chapter before moving onto the next mission, which will feature Lavinet, Tallys, Halek, and Guard-kun)! And the soundtrack of the game is still being worked on; UI work on the Twine version is starting to wrap up and should be done by late next month: pretty much all of the main interfaces are implemented, and now all that's left to do is polishing, last-minute tweaks, mobile compatibility stuff, and minor edits before I start populating everything with the game's actual data! The ChoiceScript code for all chapters has also officially been ported to Twine (minus today's update and about half of the day off interludes), so a lot of progress has been made in an astonishingly short amount of time! Again, there's still more to be done: after all of those pieces are in place, I still have to go through everything with a fine-toothed comb and implement bug fixes and my own edits and tweaks, which will take some time while I continue to work on simultaneously updating the alpha build every month. But I'm very grateful to everyone helping me work on this upgrading and rehaul of Shepherds (my partner Jeremy for the code conversion, Andraz Vene for the UI, Ivan Duch for the soundtrack), as well as to all of you for your patience as we work and hustle to get it done! 💖 Even Jeremy's brother and his friend (who both work in tech) are lending their help on the tech side of things, so it's been very lovely (and a bit surprising) to see Shepherds go from a very individual, solo effort to a team project in a short amount of time!

(We took a few days at the beginning of the month to visit family in LA for my partner's 30th birthday; we spent his actual birthday at Universal Studios Hollywood, which was a lot of fun because we haven't been since we were young kids, but also a reminder of our age because all of the rides made us horrifically motion-sick. 😂 We still did them all, though...) 

Content notes for this update: be warned, there is heavy content featuring alcohol and drunkenness in Trial #2! MC does not have to drink and is given the option to remain totally sober, but they are surrounded by drunk people for the duration of the trial, so something to keep in mind! 

I like the route where MC is drunk because I think some of the bits and lines are hilarious, and actually wanted to go even more extreme with it as the night went on, but I figured that the level of sheer blind incoherence I was gunning for would have made completing the mission totally implausible, lol, and also how some people act at different levels of drunkenness can be quite different (sobbing mess, angry brawler, shameless flirt), so in the end I kept it a little less chaotic than what I was first envisioning... even if it doesn't seem like it...

For Riel or Shery!mancers: they both get cute romance scenes in either route (drunk or sober), though the scenes are markedly different from each other, being more humorous if you're drunk and more 🥺 if you're sober! Just a tip! And remember, you will definitely need to use the quickbuild to access these scenes, since their remaining day off interludes haven't been written yet, so the number of romance flags needed to trigger their scenes can't be accrued the normal way yet!

Total wordcount: 915,162 words without code

What's Next

Trial #3 of the labyrinth and the wrap-up of this mission to the past! Some revelations and maybe a puzzle await us next? 

I hope you enjoy! 💖