Strangers on Paper - Devlog #7

Because we’ve welcomed a lot of you with the release of SoP, I feel compelled to once again remind you we like to use dev logs as some sort of progress journal entries. This is definitely one of those.

This past month has been quite a stale one. Progress was made, yes, but not remotely as much as we’d been making - nor as much as we’d projected ourselves. That may be just that, a projection problem, since by now we should know, we should remember that we work in powerful bursts, then small periods of detaching ourselves from this for a bit, only to come back with full force. In my search for possible culprits, I’d like to blame the fact that I don’t write these dev logs as weekly entries anymore, and therefore don’t keep track of our progress as neatly as we used to (although that’s a lie, I’m pretty sure if I go back and read the earliest ones, there’ll be a bunch of “wow, we’re so surprised we are going through the exact same thing that will continue to happen to us next year and continue to surprise us!”). Creativity crisis aside, I am glad we did take an official week off from working on SoP in our free time this past month, for the first time in…

In…

It’d been a while. Anyway.

From the very beginning, I used to sit down to write these dev logs when I was fed up with writing in order to fall in love with the story again. So… here we are! Just to be clear, it’s not that I don’t love our game - it’s more about how sometimes the process of working on it can get exhausting. There’s times I look at my pages and I think “fuck this” and convince myself none of it is worth it. I think it’s important to be honest about that because I tend to see so many creative people who seem to be very disciplined or confident or blessed or whatever, and are able to deliver a lot more than I, as a writer, or even us, as a team, are capable of, and that makes me feel so… unfit.

Then Grogu will send me a meme he made with our characters and that’s a nice little reminder that the best way to approach this when it gets too daunting - and any creative pursuit, at least for me - is just that, through fun and play. Every person is different and your own process or relationship with creativity might not resonate with this, but if it does, I do encourage you to do things in a way that may be just for yourself, just for fun. That’s 100% the approach I had when writing all my favorite scenes in SoP - and as I write this I vividly remember some instances of characters discussing this exact same feeling and, yet again, I dare to be surprised to encounter it.

The GG machine, Ideas and the AVN landscape

It’d been a year since Grogu and I first met in person and we finally managed to do it again! And this photo is the only record of that happening, because in less than 24 hours I lost that napkin. Sorry, Grogu.

There’s a quote by Seth Godin I came across recently.

“One way to become creative is to discipline yourself to generate bad ideas. The worse the better. Do it a lot and magically you’ll discover that some good ones slip through.”

We’ve had a lot of very bad ideas lately. Which means, we got a bunch of good ones. Good as in ‘this is something we’d be willing to commit our free time to and make sure to stick to it till the end no matter how long that takes’. But there’s another factor we can’t help but take into account and that is… you guys. The ideas we’ve been having for future AVNs we want to work on are not exactly things we see much of in the AVN landscape but maybe that’s a good thing? We do go back and forth on that one a lot so we may throw some more polls your way in the future.

Ask Gizmo/Grogu

This is something Grogu has suggested we include at the end of a dev log and I kept forgetting, but here it is. Feel free to throw any questions in the comments about the creation/development/lore/whatever of SoP and we may address them on our next log. Also, feel free to judge who made the nicer ghost on that napkin.

You wouldn’t believe how many times I had to edit this dev log to make it less all-over-the-place (it still is, I know), so if you made it up to here, thank you! Here’s your reward in the form of a render of a character we are madly in love with and have been debating for months on whether to show her or not (sometimes I think we make a game leaving choices to the players because we suck at making choices ourselves).

Once again, we’d like to extend our gratitude to those of you who take their time to share your love for our game. You wouldn’t believe how much those voices help drown the Captain Hammers of the world (too obscure of a reference? I wish it wasn’t).