Strangers on Paper - DevLog #21

Before we get started, if you just happened to have joined our Discord server in the past few weeks… We’re sorry, okay? That must have been confusing to you. And, like, to everyone else in there.

But not really that sorry.

We’ve got a bunch of stuff to share with y’all and that was our way of, uhm, teasing you. You can take it as in “we are absolute marketing masterminds”, or “we didn’t even think it through, it was a joke and we ran with it”.

So here’s the first piece of news we’re excited to share: Our first build of SOP got approved on Steam! This is really, really exciting to us because, in our time researching the platform, we had read quite the list of horror stories regarding developers and their games. The process was a bit overwhelming but not as… negative? As we thought it would be. We were prepared to have to edit and change and remake several things, or even have our game rejected, yet in the end, we were just asked to fix very technical details and the approval went in quite smoothly. This was a bit of a test submission, so we are still expecting issues to come up by the time we upload an updated build with Chapter 2, in which, you know, the adult fun begins.

So how is this related to the whole Discord thing I’m addressing extremely vaguely? Well one of the things we were asked to correct was the fact that we had marked our game as including achievements, but we’d completely forgotten to actually include them. We already had a few in mind by the time this came up, so it just came down to making an actual list and then… there’s the art issue. If you’re familiar with Steam games, you’ll know achievements have their own cute little icons - though the cute factor really depends on the developers’ taste. And we were all in for cute. There was an artist we had in mind to work with, so I did what I love doing most when I want to illustrate something specific (usually a scene for Grogu), I resorted to Paint. I put a few little doodles together, sent them to Grogu for him to check out, and he liked them. Like, he loved them. “BUT THEY’RE SCUFF”, I said. “AND THAT’S OUR BRAND”, he said. And proceeded to set one of them as our Discord Server Icon. I didn’t have much to say after that. Truth is, I actually got fond of them! Scuff or not, they had this weird charm to them of “we put this together without having any idea of what we’re doing”, and yeah, that’s definitely very in brand for us. So all those icons you’ve been seeing, they will be the ten achievements we have currently introduced to be featured in the Steam version of Chapter 1. As for their names, meanings, or how to get them, I’ll leave that for you to guess for the time being. If you haven’t added Strangers on Paper to your Steam wishlist, this is your chance to do it! It does help a lot!

Moving on! I gotta say, postponing the release date for Chapter 2 was the best decision we’ve made since releasing Chapter 1. We were terrified to make that announcement, yet once it was done, all the anxiety washed away. I think neither of us had felt as free as we have been feeling since, and therefore, we’ve been stupidly productive. Which is ironic, in a way, but it makes sense. Yet for all that progress, we’ve been debating what exactly we’d like to share in these dev logs, and I think it’s because the whole release date pushback has, well, pushed us back to that place of second-guessing everything we announce (mix that in with the impulsive decision to change our server icon every day for ten days and you get… GGS!).

So what is there actually to say about Chapter 2? I think that, so far, it has allowed us to fall even more in love with our characters. The visual improvements have me really digging our MC - and I can imagine Grogu rolling his eyes at that, because he’ll never be satisfied. These days I have been going back and editing things from as early as the first scene in the chapter, and I’m so glad I did, because I’m freaking loving it all. Writing for SOP always feels like a bit of a magical experience, because I think I know these characters and then they say something in conversation that I hadn’t initially planned, and then Grogu renders that scene out and certain gestures or details take me by surprise and it’s a never-ending cycle of that and… whatever, random render slideshow!

On a side note, we’d like to let you know we have now organized our Patreon content under the new “Collections'' feature for you to access easily. And you may want to look out for that category on the bottom left this week…

Finally, for my random personal note of this log, does anyone have any advice for when your neighbor is sending cockroaches your way but you’re moving away in two weeks but you still don’t want to have the roaches as roomies for the time being because the whole move is already stressful enough and every time you think you have beat them they keep coming back and then you found out they can even lay eggs after dead?

Uhm, have a great week.