Tiny Update

Hi everybody, so here's me with just a tiny update on where I stand with Shepherds stuff this month!

As you might know, I'm actually out of town for the entire month and staying at a cottage on the beach with my partner, mostly to get away from the searing heat of our desert home, and also to sort of de-compress after the last several months of traveling, hectic busyness, and stress, including all of the things that surrounded (and continue to surround) my first book launch.

We're both still working, just at the beach instead of in the desert, but we're also hoping to take things just a bit slower than we normally do in order to explore the place we're in and relax a little bit!

...Of course, that means that more unexpected work and deadlines got dumped on me than ever before (😅😅😅), and the fact that my original laptop is still broken and I'm working on my partner's old one doesn't really help with my efficiency! It's somewhat of a long story, but his is a Mac, and I've never used one of those before, so I lost a few days just trying to adapt my wretched lizard brain to a new OS...

Anyway, I'm still determined to enjoy my time here, but some adjustments had to be made to my Shepherds workload this month in accordance to my new circumstances (e.g. being out of town and on a different computer than the one I'm used to). These apply for this month only, and really I don't think they'll affect anyone very much at all, but sometimes I like to just write stuff down so I can truly process it for myself... and to be as transparent as possible with you, of course!

• Depending on the complexity of the questions I receive, I might only answer 15 questions for this Q&A rather than 20. It is really doubtful that I will follow through with this but I like to mentally give myself flexibility gfljgdflgj
• Due to the fact that my photo manipulation program of choice (paint.net.......) was on my old laptop and is incompatible with my partner's, and I can't have things sent to this beach cottage anyway, the tarot cards that are mailed each month for Vice-Commanders and up will be about 5 days to a week late. I'm very sorry for this inconvenience!
• While I am definitely going to update the alpha build at the usual time this month, I'm not sure yet how much new content I'll be able to add to it; I haven't even been able to touch it yet, but I've been known to crank out 20,000 words in a few days or be stuck at a few thousand for three weeks, so I don't have a good read on how much I'll be able to progress yet. However, I am making a resolution to fix the numerous and frankly mortifying bugs that have been reported through the new bug report system recently (thank you, to everyone who submitted a ticket; you are truly a godsend and I appreciate your help so much). 
• Important: I am also going to work on getting a "quickstart" system in place for people who have their saves continually wiped out whenever the alpha build gets updated. This will be a very basic, rudimentary system where you can manually input things like your character creation stuff, stats, and the most important choices from past chapters, than skip straight to the current chapter of the alpha build (in our case, Chapter 7). I fully expect this system to lead to its own wonkiness and continuity errors and stat abuse and whatever else, but it will add convenience for people who don't want to play through, like, 500,000 words every time their saves get nuked or a bug crashes their game. I hope this helps! But I will drop the strong disclaimer now that I'm not willing to devote a ton of time on making sure this quickstart system leads to perfect playthroughs, either, since this will be an alpha-only feature and will be discarded by the time the game reaches publication! So long as everyone understands the risks! 😅
• So, working on those bug fixes, making the quickstart system, and working on some new content for Chapter 7 will take up my efforts for the alpha build this month!

Other things: 

• The short story and other Patreon stuff will proceed as usual. I am still brainstorming and thinking on some new merch ideas, so Vice-Commanders and up can look forward to that on the horizon!
• We are still waiting for the finishing touches on Trouble's character card; Ayla and Tallys's are in the queue after his; and Caine's (which you voted to create) will be started on September 20th.
• We are still waiting on Riel's character sheet (also determined by your vote) to be completed.
• I have a fun goody or two planned for the next few months!
• I did a rehaul of some of the pages on the Shepherds of Haven website last week and will likely redo the character page completely, which will require some more character art commissions... 👀 Hopefully it will look more like a video game start screen, but we'll see!

I think that's it for now--there are always so many tasks and projects floating around that I sort of forget to mention them, so let me know if there's something you're curious about! And again, thank you so much for your continued patience, support, and understanding; I hope you're having a wonderful week, and don't forget to send your questions in for the Q&A! ☀️