Strangers On Paper - Devlog #7

You know when you’re playing “A Plague Tale” and you just think to yourself, “Hey, let’s ditch everything and just create a post apocalyptic game”?

Don’t worry, it’s just an intrusive thought, it’ll go away soon along with “and that really nice thing your friend said, he was just being kind”.

So this week we did something we’d been sort of postponing since the beginning of this journey. No, not tags, it was actually Reddit. We’d been avoiding dipping our toes in there for a long while now. Maybe it’s that internalized fear of rejection so great that makes George McFly sound like a totally reasonable dude. Luckily it’s paired with moments of amazingly delusional feelings of greatness that allow me to say “fuck it, let’s rock their world”. We only really allowed ourselves to do it after finding what appeared to be a warm little corner of wholesomeness where we hoped to receive a pat in the back or two that would motivate us to share more. We were not expecting a fucking giant group bear hug that would have us tumbling back and wondering what direction we came from.

To put it simply, the response has been overwhelmingly beautiful.

Anyway, there was something that was brought up a lot in that post discussion - the realness (that a word? Really, Microsoft? Damn, I need to refresh my brain dictionary) of Grogu’s art. It was definitely one of the things that I appreciated about it when I reached out to him to collaborate. I saw skin texture, stretch marks, moles and I was 100% in. And all that attention to it made me reflect on why our initial idea for this story evolved/mutated/got out of hand and grasp and reach so easily.

The simplest answer is just that: Imperfections were always there from the beginning. Neither of us could care much for cookie cutter characters with no real backstory - which is really something we’d considered at first. There’s just something inherently appealing about trauma, and hopefully I don’t sound as psychopathic to you reading this as it’s starting to sound in my head. But isn’t emotional baggage just as mouth watering as acne scars? Whatever the hell that means.

Anyway, here are some perfect imperfections for you.