Strangers on Paper - Devlog #13

Uff, where do we start? First of all, THANK YOU ALL! Holy shit.

We’ll get a little bit more into our personal feelings and progress with everything that’s been happening down below, but let’s hit it off with the news we want to deliver the most.

Goals

It’s funny, we’ve always been somewhat protective of our progress, yet the more we share, the more comfortable we feel with you guys as a community. With the weekly updates we’ve been doing during these weeks of fundraising, we’ve figured out we want to go back to doing weekly devlogs updating you on everything taking place working towards the release of Chapter 3.

As of right now, these are the next goals we’ll be diving into:

THIS WEEK: Brushing up missing/failed renders and some of the writing for the last scene in Amy’s path. Revising coding for Becca’s path.

NEXT WEEK & 1st WEEK OF JUNE: Finalizing renders for Amy’s last scene. Full revision of coding. Brushing up writing for ‘ending’ scenes.

2nd WEEK OF JUNE: Finalizing renders for ‘ending’ scenes. Alpha testing, fixing hundreds of mistakes from both sides and stressing out.

3rd WEEK OF JUNE: Beta testing, fixing mistakes we won’t believe we didn’t notice before, stressing out some more.

4th WEEK OF JUNE: Early Release of Chapter 3. This version will be missing a few features (such as translations in Chinese and Spanish, which will be worked on around this time), it will be up to you whether you want to play this or wait for the full version on Steam. We had always planned to release it this way so that we could get SOMETHING out as soon as we had it baked, but more on that in the next dev logs.

Of course, these goals may get pushed back or we may even reach some ahead of time, yet, as mentioned above, weekly devlogs will be back and we’ll be checking in to report on how we’re doing in each area.

Hardware goals

Some of you guys have been asking about this as well, so we thought we’d share what our next goals are in terms of upgrading our hardware.

• Grogu: In the long term, I would like to upgrade to a better GPU (24GB), which will be what I will be saving up for.

• Gizmo: I have been working from my laptop for years but recently I’ve been able to claim back some of my old PC’s parts. It’s not the best (it was totally the shit in 2021!) but I’ll be saving up to buy a PSU, a computer case, and a monitor so that hopefully I can also help Grogu with the rendering for Chapter 4.

And just when you thought this dev log was over… these bitches keep writing their journal-y paragraphs.

Grogu: A thousand times, thank you to everyone who contributed, whether it was a lot or a little, it means the world to us. When the payout comes through, I'll be able to get a GPU with at least 12GB VRAM, which should handle the remaining scenes after some optimization. My old card had 24GB so most scenes were built with that in mind, but this is already something we can actually WORK with.

I've been rendering on my laptop in the meantime. It's slow as hell, but it works, and I've been working through a few backlog renders and fixing things that come up looking strange from the batch render, like an animal so powerful it got tired of getting carried and decided to fly behind the protagonist, or Tony's rebel shirt that feels like opening out of nothing. This has been happening for quite a long time and I haven't found a logical reason why (as Becca has said, Tony is a bit of a slut).

Gizmo will be helping with the coding for the rest of the chapter, so that will help making things go smoother.

Gizmo: Perhaps as you read the goals above you were wondering, why am I still ‘brushing up the writing’ for scenes that I had supposedly finished writing? Here’s the thing. Up until the moment the scene goes from being words on paper to being beautiful art by Grogu, I still have the chance to change anything I want. To scrap several pages, even. This leads to a lot of overthinking to the point I get weirdly obsessed about everything. It got to the point I had re-read it so many times that the jokes weren’t funny, everything felt out of place, and I just got tired of it all. I tried moving on and doing some writing for Chapter 4 as well, but it had only become harder and harder with all the complex feelings surrounding the constant pushbacks.

So, what have I been doing if not writing for SoP? Well, writing, of course. I wasn’t sure how long we’d be dealing with the technical difficulties, so while SoP was in a… sort of stand-by, I decided to own those difficulties and come up with two concepts for two very short visual novels that would rely more on the text and code side of things and fewer but powerful images. It was my way of keeping my brain on writer mode with the time I had so far been devoting to SoP. I’ve been writing some pieces here and there for these two, and if they ever do see the light of day, they will be full releases, not longer than, let’s say, one single chapter of SoP.

And then this month I came back to SoP and realized… Well, all my previous worries had been nonsense. I don’t actually need to scrap that entire thing because it still works for me and it’s time to let go. I love this chapter and I’m ready for it to become yours to enjoy as well. Not only that, but I’m immensely excited to tackle the beautiful mess that will become Chapter 4.

Final thoughts

Once again, a fucking massive thank you to everyone who has been supporting us throughout this time. We reached our goal in about a month and half, which is already insane to us, but what’s even more insane is that you guys kept messaging us asking and suggesting other ways in which you could help out.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for helping us make this possible.