Alpha Preview Update (September) (Patreon)

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Password: neverfear_spooktemberishere ⬅ ❗️

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

What's New:

• 17,000 words of new content!
• The start of Chapter 9! Sun Court shenanigans! The Autarch makes his first appearance!
• The SURPRISE GUEST STAR appears!
• New Shery day off interlude!
• Read people's mail like the mischievous little sneak-thief you are! Targeted junk ads, letters from relatives, cringey love poems, dirty little secrets and allusions... we've got it all!

Developer's Notes:

Hi everyone, hope you've been well!

This month was something of a perfect storm (for reasons I'll outline below), so I fell behind on a lot of things and was stressing that I wouldn't be able to produce an update in time! I don't know if there's a word for people who perform really well under pressure (I only say that because I produced more words than I normally do in a much shorter amount of time lol) but simultaneously hate it, hate the pressure, and constantly feel anxious and nauseous from the (self-imposed) stress LOL 🫠 It's like how the Ket take soldier pills to heighten their adrenaline and push through any fatigue or injury during intense battles and warfare, performing at exceptional and extraordinary levels, and then immediately collapse and have to recover for three weeks afterwards when the stuff they were powering through inevitably catches up to them two-fold!

Anyway, the primary reason why things got jumbled this month was because what started as a small issue ("oh, I don't think it makes sense to have a day off in Chapter 9, since it's explicitly stated that most of the companions are out on their own missions, so how could you hang out with them in a way that makes any sense?...") ballooned into a much larger "OH GOD NONE OF THE OUTLINES I'VE BEEN FOLLOWING ACTUALLY WORK, WHAT THE FUCK HAVE I DONE." In the shortest possible terms, I think you might remember that Chapter 9 and Sibella de Vespe did not originally exist, and that I came up with them quite recently in order to smooth out certain pacing issues with an extra chapter?

Well, in my calculations, that Chapter 9 also included a necessary extra day off (it was actually the principal reason why I invented the chapter to begin with, just to have that extra day off lmao)... but then I realized that if I can't put a day off there because of plot issues... and then it created this entire domino effect where I realized everything had been thrown off, because I'd also moved the Ascendancy Festival from Chapter 7 to Chapter 8, but then where would Lovelace Day go if there's no day off in Chapter 9... and that led to the realization that I'd been working with a faulty timeline all this time. This was literally my face when I started to realize the monumental nature of this issue:

I literally panic-bought outlining software called Plottr because clearly the issue was that I was using the world's shittiest, most hackneyed Excel spreadsheet to chart everyone's day off interludes and that definitely contributed to the problem, because it looked horrible and was not great to use, like at all. Looked like this:

(Shout out to dizzy-tx for giving me the idea to seek out Plottr, by the way; years ago she recognized how horrible my system was and very kindly send me a copy of a product called Scapple, and while looking to see if it had any related products for timelines, I came across Plottr. Thanks, Steph!)

Anyway, Plottr is great and I felt immense relief in being able to use it to get everything looking nice and organized again, but it did take several days to both import the data that I already had and move things around and actually, you know, straighten the timelines out and do the actual plotting and outlining with all of the things I'd changed in the last... (? two years? I don't even remember when I created the Excel spreadsheet: clearly a long time ago if I was still referring to Archmage Tangriel by his old, obsolete name). 

The outline looks like this now, with each cardlet having several paragraphs that show on hover and each character having their own neat little timeline: 

(And yes, I did redact things specifically for this screenshot so there would be no spoilers! Nice try!)

Anyway, getting all of that untangled set me back by a few days... And with how my schedule works, a few days can make a huge difference! There were also all the other normal things clamoring for my attention. For example, our composer, Ivan Duch, is doing all of the final mixing and tuning up for the first volume of the Shepherds of Haven soundtrack this week! He'll be releasing it on his website very soon, so you'll be able to hear some of the game's songs early, including new versions of Chase and Trouble's themes! I'll let you know when that's officially ready!

The full soundtrack (however many volumes that ends up being) will also be bundled with the "legendary edition" of the game when it's published to storefronts--but we can get to more of those fun details later down the line. :) 

On to the actual update: I'll be interested to hear if you guys were expecting that ending. ;) And it was tremendous fun writing out the kind of mail each companion would receive for Shery's day off interlude, but it was also a ton of work! Each character has a minimum of 3 different letters that's randomly selected when you peek inside an envelope, so one player might see a love poem in Shery's mail, while another might see something totally different! Just wanted to clear that up in case there was any confusion during the ensuing, post-update discussions! XD 

If Chapter 9 feels a bit... long-winded and descriptive, I admit to feeling quite intimidated by the prospect of finally introducing an environment (the Sun Court) and characters the story has been building up for some time. And sometimes the way to fight through such paralysis is to just... fire blindly like a Tommy gun, not thinking too hard about it, and also I was in such a time crunch that I'm just going to leave it as is for now. Best motto I ever adopted: "I can always go back and clean it up!"

Last but not least, prior to the whole Plottr disaster, I dipped my proverbial hands into baking and painting this month! I think my restless mind was seeking a way to sort of turn itself off and relax into a flow-state, with a creative activity that doesn't require me to constantly quest and probe and write in my head, so I started experimenting with both out of curiosity. (I've obviously done both before, just not really for the pure enjoyment of it.) I made two chocolate cherry almond cakes: the first was hampered by my use of storebought frosting, the second was bolstered by the switch to handmade frosting but ruined by a last-minute, impulsive decision to use canned cherry pie filling between the layers... Good idea in concept (?), not so great in execution. So one day I'll try making it with homemade frosting and homemade cherry filling, but right now, we're sick to death of chocolate cake, so I'm letting it have a cooldown period.

As for the painting, I've painted 4 paintings across 4 nights so far (it requires me to stay up late to paint after work, which is why I stopped momentarily to power through this update). Only the fourth painting seemed worth sharing, but I'm quite pleased with it! :)

I'm, you know, a complete amateur, but I'm looking forward to just doing a painting a day (where I can) and seeing where it goes! I tend to be such a perfectionist that I'm trying to take up a hobby where I'm just doing it to relax and turn my brain off rather than thinking, I MUST BE AMAZING AND I MUST BECOME GOOD AT THIS VERY SOON, as is my wont. I'm using an artist's watercolor pad, so hopefully by the time I'm done, each page in the pad will have its own painting!

As an aside, I've always admired and envied the absolute hell out of artists; trying my hand at this has made me respect them even more! It's a pain in the ass, this art stuff. Super fun, but it requires so much patience and skill and vision and detail! It's literally insane. Every artist and creative person out there, I give you my deepest thanks and commendation for making art and putting it into the world! You're my heroes!

Total wordcount: 1,025,606 words (without code)

What's Next:

Chapter 9 will continue next month; I'm not sure yet if I'll have another character interlude next time. It could go either way!

Anyway, I really hope you enjoy! Leave your thoughts here, on Tumblr, or on Discord as always, and I hope you have a great end to your September as we get ready for autumn and the season of scares! 🧡🎃