#I wonder hows that package doing now its been so many years..😂😂

[nippoisalien]

THEY ARE HERE!!!!! AAAAA MY FIRST CELESTE GAME'S OFFICIAL MERCH!!😭😭🥹🥹💞💞✨✨✨ THE ART IS SO CUTE AND BEAUTIFUL!!!!!

(I love that there is the artist's name on the acrylic too, thank you artist "Mikoto"!!💞)

[shepherds-of-haven]

Happy New Year, everyone! I thought it would be fun to do a little retrospective on the game's progress over the last year... Shepherds of Haven has grown so much from the little demo I posted in January 2018, and it continues to steadily build and flourish in so many different and exciting ways! Here's a look at just some of the things we accomplished in 2023!

I added 143,151 words to the game (2.5 main chapters, 8 new character interludes) in 2023: the equivalent of writing the longest Lord of the Rings book in one year! We also broke our huge 1 million word milestone—without including code—meaning Shepherds of Haven is now officially twice as long as War and Peace, and almost as long as the entire 7-book Harry Potter series... and all in a single game!

A lot goes into game creation behind the scenes, including the coordination and creation of visual assets for the game—like character cards, codex entries, maps, portraits, and backgrounds—fun stuff for the fans (like the MC info template we created), and songs for the official soundtrack. As the game creeps slowly and determinedly towards its initial completion, that also means learning new things as a solo developer to prepare for the future, like learning to build an official website, researching business and tax practices, and beginning to think about how to conduct testing, publishing, and marketing down the road. Much of what I enumerate here hasn't been made public yet and will continue to cook in the background for a while, but I'm very proud of the work I've gotten done this year and will be excited to unveil more in the future!

And of course, for even more Shepherds of Haven content, I've added and completed even more stories for our little library on Patreon (which also has sizable word count at this point): The Bridge of Bones (a Trouble and Riel murder mystery), O Happy Dagger (a dark adventure featuring Briony, Chase, and Red), and The Hunt (a wild tale involving Tallys, Halek, Shery, and new kinds of spirits, fey magic, and Elves) were all serial stories completed in 2023, while Some Kind of Virus is a cyberpunk zombie apocalypse AU that will continue to be updated with new chapters monthly.

A full list of the Shepherd short stories and serial novellas (with links) can be viewed here!

I hope you enjoyed this session of Shepherds of Haven Wrapped! Honestly, this doesn't actually cover everything I've been working on, but some things can't be packaged and listed out neatly, or otherwise won't seem very interesting to anyone else but me! 😂 As we inch through Chapter 9 and get more interludes done (only a few more main chapters to go), I'm hopeful that I'll also be able to find time to work on my next novel, but we'll see if the Shepherds schedule ends up ramping up or settling down as we work steadily towards finishing the main story!

One important thing before wrapping up is to acknowledge your guys' role in this wonderful, wild journey. I want to express my heartfelt gratitude to each and every one of you for your invaluable contributions to the development of Shepherds of Haven. Whether you took the time to share links to the game, supported its growth on Discord or Patreon, left encouraging messages or asked interesting questions, reported bugs, or showcased your remarkable works of fanfiction or fanart, I am sincerely thankful for the unwavering support from this amazing community! Your collective efforts have played a pivotal role in shaping the world of the game into what it is today. Words cannot adequately convey my gratitude for your support, and I am truly blessed to have such a passionate community surrounding this project.

As we step into 2024, I am filled with anticipation for the developments awaiting Shepherds of Haven. Big things are on the horizon, and I am so excited to share these experiences with you! Thank you for being an integral part of this journey, and here's to the continued growth of our shared little world. Cheers to 2024—may it be a year filled with creativity, adventure, and joy! 🎊

[sheerioswifties]

Hehe, that's awesome! Omg I'm realizing now that I've had so much to say about Divide that I've not shared on here yet. But so, without further adieu, here's my #DivideDay story:

So I had also preordered the special album set, like, the second it was available. I anxiously awaited March 3rd, keeping up on all the Ed news leading up to it. I wasn't on Tumblr or any social media yet, but thankfully there were things like the Ed Sheeran EU Twitter I could check for updates all the time. So we'd stay up late into the night to hear the release of SOY and COTH and Ed's first live radio interview back, etc. I'd been going through being in and out of the hospital as usual so we were trying to really focus on all this stuff to get me pumped and excited etc, planning to go all out on the 3rd when it arrived. I tracked the package as it made its way towards me, noticing it stopped for a little bit in Illinois in the Chicago area so I was texting(annoying) my friends like "it's right by you right now!!!!!" 😂

Then, March 3rd came, and we waited....and looked at the tracking and....okay long story short? The shipping company screwed up. My Divide album wasn't going to/didn't make it to me on the 3rd! Not just that but it ran into a weekend where I didn't actually get the album for another five days. I can't even tell you the frustration....but hey, it became a whole thing, a story. When in finally did come, I was back in the hospital so my husband went and got it gift wrapped all pretty and brought it to me there.

In the mean time, of course, on March 3rd the second we could we bought the whole album on streaming so that we could play and replay the whole thing over and over just like pretty much everyone else did, hehe. My husband listened to it while he was driving around doing errands and things and came back with his own reviews/remarks on it that I thought were pretty good; like how the album really makes you feel like you're being taken on a trip around the world with Ed, taking in all these different cultures and feelings... like, Barcelona just blasting with the sun out and everything made you feel, well, exactly how the song describes. Then you're in Africa bopping to Bibia Be Ye Ye and you just can't NOT get the biggest smile on your face and move to the beat while tapping your hands on the steering wheel; Galway Girl and Nancy Mulligan make you want to get up and dance a jig while ordering an authentic cold Irish stout; Dive gives you that almost jazz, laid-back but sexy feeling of, well I can't think of the best way to put any of this into words but yeah...Perfect sounded like this epic sweeping classic romance, illiciting feelings of a big ballroom and formal dancing, almost going back in time. COTH gave out so many nostalgic feels while SOY felt like dancing barefoot and close in the sand at a nighttime party in the Caribbean. What Do I Know? feels like an anthem for our generation, the new "Where Is The Love?" but with such a simple and fun/friendly vibe, it joins people together with its own beat...Happier felt like the climatic moment in a romantic movie where there is a sad tragedy leaving you wondering how things will turn out and feeling that feeling....Save Myself is so deep and reflective while striking that perfect balance of sad but hopeful...

Okay I'm rambling now, hopefully this all makes sense. I'll probably come back and edit this later when I'm not so exhausted, I just wanted to get something out finally as its been a year now!

So, there you have it. Congrats Ed, Happy Anniversary Divide! 💙

Tell me your #DivideDay stories!

Happy Anniversary, Divide! 💙