Alpha Preview Update (June) (Patreon)

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Password: blooms_of_june ⬅ ❗️

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

What's New:

• 15,000 words of new content
• More Chapter 8.5 - the mystery of Qael-Qanaeon unfolds. The Shepherds play out an episode of a police procedural interrogation/Line of Duty (extremely obscure reference but amazing show if anyone likes British mysteries). A random little encounter was also added a bit earlier in the chapter for some levity/team spirit!
• New Red day off interlude
• Various tweaks and corrections to previous chapters and character interludes

Developer's Notes:

Hi everyone, this has been quite the busy (yet productive) month for me! As you probably know, I came back from a trip to Europe at the beginning of the month. Jetlag was really terrible, but something good that came out of it was that I decided to change up my lifelong habits and routine to see if there was any chance in hell of my becoming what I deemed "a normal citizen of the day." I've mentioned it here and there, but I've often viewed the key to my writing productivity as my ability to stay up extremely late in comparison to most folks; I'd do regular work and all of the blasted household things that comes with being an adult during the day, and then from about 11 PM to 4 or 5 AM would be my writing time, with me waking up around noon the next day. Rinse and repeat!

As you can imagine, this is actually not... ideal for a human being, especially as one gets older and can no longer keep up with the schedule one could maintain as a brash twenty-something who considered herself above the routines of non-denizens of the night. Long story short, I took advantage of the jetlag to see if I could reverse my schedule, and the results have been quite exciting!!! I can experience things during the day now!! I can find time to go to the gym!! I no longer regard meals as irritating interruptions just as I'm trying to get into the flow of work because I get so much of it done when I wake up early!!! It might seem very simple and obvious and dumb, but it's been revolutionary for me lol, so my lifestyle, habits, health, and overall productivity have definitely seemed to have improved!

As such, here's the alpha update a little early! Progress on the Twine build continues at a steady pace, with me working on converting the last remaining bits of code code that haven't yet been ported (stuff like training the recruits, quest stuff) half the time, and raking through the converted code for bugs and errors line-by-line (main story stuff). I've almost "edited" my way through Chapter 2, with everything up until then looking perfect and pretty now, so we are getting somewhere! I'm very excited to get to the point where I can show you what astonishing leaps and bounds the game has made!

As for this alpha update! As noted last month, I was forced to nuke fairmath out of the game for good (out of sheer annoyance lol), so stat changes are going to look quite different if you go through the game again from the beginning. My guess is that you'll see your stats jump by much larger increments than before! I tried to adjust the most important stat checks accordingly as well, so I'm thinking Faceless Lords will be a bit easier to confront, at least temporarily; part of my editing process is going through and diligently adjusting stat checks to have better difficulty scaling and to prevent min-maxing from being too much of a concern, so please hold on while I continue to work on that! The final version of the game should be closer to what we want in terms of difficulty. :)

Also as noted last month, it's recommended to use the quickbuild to jump to Chapter 8.5 if you want to have kissed Alec Cross successfully, since a new variable had to be added to determine that. You can, of course, go through the game from the beginning as well; just a tip in case you want to speed things up a bit!

I've added a new Red interlude (it's quite nerdy, which is fitting for Red, but there's a good little scene in there if you're on a romance route with him) as well as more content to Chapter 8.5, including a new scene earlier in the chapter (on the way away from Ashaniel's house) for the banter and camaraderie. (If you have a high relationship with Tallys or are in a romantic relationship with her, I beg you to see what happens if you call her out in front of the street-vendor.) I also made little tweaks to earlier character interludes--the one where you first hook up with Tallys is just a touch more spicy than before, though still nothing really explicit! I am still testing the waters with how far I really want to go for the sex scenes in this game. :)

I was actually dreading this update prior to writing it, because I think I was having a bit of a block with how the interrogation scene was going to go, but after pushing through it, I actually had a lot of fun writing it and think this chapter is going to come along very briskly now! I think the trip definitely did a lot to recharge my batteries and refresh my mindset: sometimes you just need to step away from a project to come back to it with renewed excitement and fresh eyes, which is exactly how I feel about everything now! I'm a bit more on top of answering asks on Tumblr as well as more enthused about my writing (not that I ever lost that, more that a break can make things seem less daunting or overwhelming when you feel recharged and ready to tackle things anew), so thank you for your patience while I was away last month, I can attest that it really, brilliantly helped!

That's all I've got for now: I really hope you enjoy this update, and enjoy your weekend!

Total wordcount: 986,501 words without code

What's Next:

More Chapter 8.5, and likely another character interlude while I'm in the mood for it, though I'm not sure yet which one it will be! I get the sense that this latter half of Chapter 8 (the Qael-Qanaeon mission) won't be as long in wordcount as the Labyrinth mission earlier and will be more what I originally intended for the Chapter 8 missions: a more straightforward, brisk adventure after the bloated monster that Chapter 7 became. Hopefully the two "halves" of the chapter will feel balanced in terms of pacing by the end of things--wordcount isn't a great measure because something may have a high wordcount but feel really short due to lots of branching--and they can combine with each other in a way that makes more sense as we head into Chapter 9. :)

Thanks for reading, and enjoy! ☀️😎