Strangers On Paper - DevLog #13

To say these have been some busy weeks would be quite the understatement. I don’t even know how to write a dev log anymore. I mean, right now we should be taking a break. We said we would do so after the release. Wait two or three days and take at least a week or something off.

So why did I just spend the whole day writing and why is Grogu already working on the new scenes?

I think I’ll use this one to sort of journal our thoughts and feelings through this, since the answer to that question is much simpler than it would appear. It’s because of you. And I’m not blaming you here, I’m thanking you, I swear.

You’ll see, when we first started working on SOP, we knew it was going to be a bit different. Well, maybe too different, and market-wise, you never know what to expect from the audience. Ha, I say this as if I know what I’m talking about, but before I met Grogu I was really just a nerdy bean sitting anxiously behind my monitor, too mortified about calling myself a “writer” as I reached out to him about working together.

Putting this game together felt a lot like making a scrapbook of things we loved, throwing a bunch of glitter on it and then calling ourselves “devs”. We had no idea what we were doing but carried on because we just really wanted to make it happen. Of course, the fact that Grogu was passionate about creating beautiful images and I was passionate about creating meaningful stories helped a lot, but we still weren’t sure it would work.

And then, finally, after months of keeping this firstborn scrapbook to ourselves, came release day. And these are just some of the things that completely blew our minds:

• Several of you demanding we take a break now and take care of ourselves
• An impressive number of you saying you had to play both routes because you just couldn’t choose one girl over the other (or even if you did choose, you went back and played it again anyway)
• The detailed reviews, feedback and comments
• Reading through your conversations discussing theories over the characters, their past and present
• You guys recommending the game to each other
• Many of you reaching out to share your personal feelings and/or stories
• The fact that you guys are offering your financial support to this project, many of you from a very early stage, and the most recent ones, even after the game has already been released for free

We just can’t help wanting to continue working on it. And not in a stressful, feeling pressure kind of way, but in a “hey, we’ve got something good here” kind of way. I’m not saying we didn’t have any faith in it ourselves - otherwise we wouldn’t have devoted so much of us into it -, but the response we got has truly surpassed our expectations.

So… yeah. We’re slowly wrapping our heads around this whole thing and happily making our way into Chapter 2, which should be a much less bumpier road with everything we’ve learned so far.

We thank you once again from the bottom of our tired hearts and leave you with some concept art images we thought you may be interested to look at. Several details are subject to change but this is almost what our girls will be looking like in the next chapter.