Strangers on Paper - Devlog #16

Hey there, Stranger! I’m hoping you read that with a Merchant accent. I also hope you’re all doing great! We’re doing fine ourselves, only that Buenos Aires hasn’t seen the sun for weeks and that’s driving me a bit insane but oh well (yes, I’ll continue to complain about the weather till Spring comes along).

This past week I worked on the bits I felt were missing for Becca and they’ve made all the difference. I will probably be editing them in the near future, but that’s not a big deal. Most of the editing for her scenes involves making her sentences shorter, because she doesn’t speak much unless she’s fully comfortable. So I’ll usually read a scene back and be like ‘nope, that’s too long to sound like Becca’ and cut a lot of words out.

Grogu has finally gotten hold of the GPU this past Sunday and the number of renders per day has already grown substantially so we’re both super excited about that. I’ll be the one doing the coding for the renders after he’s done with those and with the post-processing so that’ll save us a lot of time - or probably result in a lot of unexpected bugs! Yay.

Some things we hadn’t considered initially and that may require some extra time:

• Recaps: A long time has gone by, and perhaps some of you don’t want to play the whole thing again, so I’ve been preparing the script for short little recaps of all major events. This is very low priority so we’ll push it to the end of the development and the Early Release may not include it.

• UI and SFW version: I’m pretty sure many people don’t know that SoP is by default set on “SFW” mode, and the more explicit renders can be turned on from the settings menu. The UI will go through a bit of a rework to make this and other things clearer and the Early Release version may only include the NSFW version. Why do we keep doing that? Ah… a question for another day. Again, this is a low priority of ours at the moment, so we may keep the same UI just for now.

In short, we’re still about a week and something behind our schedule, but hopefully me working the rest of the Ren’Py code will put us back on track, especially during the alpha testing period. I’m honestly super looking forward to that (it’s when I play the whole game back to back from the beginning, including Chapter 3 in full finally!) while also dreading it (it’s also usually when I’m most stressed, sleep poorly and obsess over shit that doesn’t matter).

Since this next week doesn’t involve much writing for me, I’ll also be working on the Behind-The-Scenes article about character creation. You guys have already given me such good suggestions, let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to read about on it! I may also move forward with Chapter 4 (the final one!) while I’m at it…