Alpha Preview (September)

Hiya everybody, I've got the alpha update for September all ready for you! I got a surprising amount of work done on the game this month, so I'm excited to share the new content and changes with you! Read on to find out what's new!

Play the alpha here

Password: remembertohydrate

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Report bugs here 

View bug reports here

What's New:

• ❗️ 20,000 words to Chapter 7 
• New customization features in the prologue (you can now have canon freckles, piercings, or a shit-ton of rings to cut people with when you punch them)
• New nickname options: befriending Trouble will lead to the option of being called by a shortened version of MC's first name ("Nick" instead of "Nicholas," "Ari" instead of "Arianna," etc.), if the player wants that option. Note: other characters besides Trouble may notice or employ this nickname down the road, so don't make it a pet name that only Trouble would use if you want to avoid that. 
• Attending the Circle and being friendly with Red will also unlock an option to have him call the MC by a shortened version of their first name: this can be the same as the "common use" Trouble one, or a different version ("Nicky" instead of "Nick," "Aria" instead of "Ari", etc.). Again, this is entirely optional!
• Ability to turn music and alert sounds off and on in the settings (found in the stats screen). I thought this was enabled before, but it turns out I'm an idiot and forgot to actually do that. :D You can hear various songs or noises throughout the game with the option toggled on: however, these are just for fun and will likely be removed in the published version of the game (one is just a menu select sound from Persona that I threw in there just for my own amusement, so that'll definitely be removed), so enjoy them while you can!
• ❗️Various and numerous bug fixes and typo fixes, including the one that was causing the Nathe fight in Chapter 5 to endlessly loop. Many thanks to everyone who reported in to the new bug system; it helped immensely in hunting down all of those pesky glitches! And profuse and special thanks to emeraldgreaves, whose diligent and helpful reporting helped me figure out issues and errors that had been eluding me for some time! 🙏
• ❗️ New quickstart/checkpoint system! Your saves are very likely going to get nuked in this update, but luckily, I've fixed up a little quickstart system that will allow you to manually input the major data from your past playthroughs and hop straight to the latest chapter, in case you're sick of replaying through 650,000+ words of content every time you lose your saves! It's not as perfect or as thorough as actually playing through the build, of course, but I think it will be much more convenient for playtesting purposes. I hope you enjoy this alpha-only feature!

Developer Notes:

I truly took everyone's generosity and patience to heart for this chapter; I was really stressing out about meeting my self-imposed deadlines, but you all sent such kind and supportive messages that I felt better about taking some time to relax and take a breath instead of trying to blitz through everything and force the issue! As a result, when I came back to writing after a weekend of just having fun, everything flowed much more smoothly, and I felt way more productive and creative--so thank you very much for everything! 💖We still haven't been able to see the tide pools yet (the tides have not been cooperating and have been making low tide at 3 AM  😂) but that will be happening later this week! 🌊 

I don't think there's too much to say about this update that hasn't been said above, except that there's juicy romance bits and really, horrible, awful swamp bits; Diviners and high Psionic users are going to have a grand old time this chapter and will really get their time to shine, if 'grand' can be defined as 'horrifying' and 'time to shine' means 'suffering'... so have fun with that!~

As a note: this chapter is suitably dark and touches on a lot of fairly scary (and/or gross) imagery and descriptions, especially of things like bugs or slimy things; if that's not your cup of tea, please be forewarned now and take care of yourself first and foremost! The primary inspirations for this update are the movies Alien, The Ritual, and the Blair Witch Project, as well as the very real and creepy Dyatlov Pass incident. So please read at your own risk!

Total wordcount: 658,572 words without code

What's Next:

More Chapter 7; very slight possibility of trying to poke some content into Chapter 4, but we'll see! 

Thank you so much for reading, and I hope you enjoy this update!