Strangers on Paper - Devlog #14

Hello, strangers! Gizmo here, writer (and now coder?!) for SoP. We hope you’ve had a lovely week and, if you're from our patria, a wonderful 25 de Mayo with locro, churros, empanadas or whatever the hell you enjoy the most. As for us, we’ve been a bit under the weather (3°C in May should be illegal but, yeah, winter is just around the corner) yet we’ve managed to pull through.

This week we went over pending corrections for some of the renders and writing in Amy’s path as planned and there was just a ‘little’ hiccup there. The video card Grogu wanted to purchase is out of stock until later this week, so for now some of the missing images are still on queue to be rendered sloooowly. Once that wretched card is in his power, he’ll be unstoppable.

This crab has seen things. Soon you will too.

As I’ve mentioned in an earlier devlog, I’ve been learning RenPy to help Grogu out with it so this week I revised and finished the coding for Becca’s path and, guys… Coding can actually be fun?! I don’t know, I’m used to writing taking up a lot of my mental energy so it was a nice change of pace. For instance, I can actually listen to music while I do it, which I can never do otherwise, and my brain appreciates the change of pace. This also means Chapter 4 will go a loooot smoother in terms of coding, because now that I know what the hell it’s all about, I’m definitely changing the way I write the script to speed things up. If you’re wondering why we hadn’t done that before… that makes two of us. One goal I did not meet was to edit the writing for the last scene on Amy’s path. I had to spend about three days in bed because of a bad cold, so I’ll catch up with that this week.

As a reminder, our goals for the next two weeks are:

• Finalizing renders for Amy’s last scene (let’s pray for that damn card to be back in stock so Grogu can get back on this sooner)

• Full revision of coding (I’m actually excited to be able to fix things now as soon as I notice them so this should go faster than planned)

• Brushing up writing for ‘ending’ scenes (for those who asked what these are, they are the little scenes you get at the end of each chapter - think of Amy in the car, or Becca with… Uhm, anyway, those)

Even more important reminders for those who may be new here:

• SoP was always planned to be a short game. Originally 3 chapters long, but once we finished chapter 1 we realized it had to be 4. So, yes, after Chapter 3 releases, Chapter 4 will be the final chapter.

• This is not our full time job. It’s something we do in our free time because we love it and the support you guys provide us literally helps us devote more time to it (we’re both freelancers so, more money from SoP means we take on less work from other things and… you get the math), so THANK YOU.

• We do have plans to continue to make more (perhaps even shorter) games in the future. But that all depends on... well, read above.

• So far, the ‘early’ release for Chapter 3 is still scheduled to go out by the end of June.

Lastly, I’ve been getting some writing questions here and there and I was wondering if there’s anything specific you guys would like to read more about (something you struggle with, something you’re just curious about, something you want to understand better, etc), your comments are more than welcome here.

Wishing you all a good week and kinder weather!