This week it’ll be a month since the first early release of Strangers On Paper and, wow. We’ve gone from slowly figuring things out, to devoting every free minute of our days to it, to creating free minutes in our days, to thinking of nothing but it, to getting it out there, to being overwhelmed by everyone’s lovely response, to… going back to slowly figuring things out.

For the first few weeks after release, we couldn’t find it in ourselves to stop. We dove right into the Chapter 2 stuff while taking in everyone’s reception, and I think it was only when life inevitably got in the way that we took a step back and said, fine, let’s take a break. But after all that, getting back to work on SOP felt… weird. What do you mean we sleep regular hours? Where’s that incessant excitement to get everything else out of the way to go back to working on it? Did a whole week just go by without us having a no-meeting?

It’s gotten to the point in which we’ve been asking ourselves - and each other - were we always like this? And… yeah. Yeah, we were. It’s just May was a pretty insane month in which this whole thing took over our lives and we lost track of how to keep things going in a… healthy or balanced way. By now you may have noticed - or if this is your first time reading one of these dev logs, then you’ll soon realize -, I mainly write these for ourselves. To keep a record of how things have been going, to reflect on our progress, to share some stuff you may find interesting. So, this is just a little reminder to both Grogu and I that we are not machines, and that our “pace” has always been characterized by “trying to find a regular pace”.

Some days I’ll sit down to just edit this one scene and end up writing for six hours straight, other days I will set an afternoon aside for writing a scene and end up writing a dev log about our progress so far instead. And that’s still an actual good day, given some days none of that may end up happening.

Which doesn’t mean we haven’t been productive though. All things considered, I’m freaking proud of us. As we were wrapping things up for Chapter 1, we did take some extra time to make sure Chapter 2 and 3 would come out a lot more smoothly and, yeah, we’ve done one hell of a job. Thanks, past Grogu and Gizmo.

Anyways, here’s where we currently are and what it means:

Writing: Like in Chapter 1, there’s 10 scenes for me to write and edit, plus the ‘ending’ scenes. So far, I’ve completed one scene, have another one at 90% (it just needs some surface editing, which consists of me checking the dialogue pacing, continuity, maybe one or two lines missing), another one at 70% (it's there from start to finish, but there’s quite a few lines missing and some formatting needed, plus another future surface edit), then two random ones that I’ve been writing and editing for months and may be around 50%. For the rest of the chapter, I have about 16 pages of content that needs to get properly organized and expanded on to actually make sense to others. My own personal goal is to make it to 50% of Chapter 2 by the end of the month - given I don’t necessarily write things chronologically, that could mean anything, so the general percentage feels more accurate/possible.

Art (Grogu): So far, Scene 1 of Chapter 2, except for a few details, is ready to work on and render. Since I rediscovered batch rendering, it has been a 180-degree change in the way I work, and I regret not having trusted it as much before. Hopefully, these visuals will come out faster now that I leave around 25-45 renders cooking overnight and can continue working the next day. Since SOP came out, I have learned many new things that I hope to implement visually. These upcoming chapters will include some new characters that I don't want to neglect. VN's usually put less effort into creating non-protagonist characters, but ZBrush/Blender are two tools that I have improved with in recent weeks and plan to use a lot for this.

Coding: The bane of our existence. Grogu has been mainly testing whether he can make the things that I need to happen at this point in the story work, and so far, he’s been successful. Future Grogu will have to deal with the rest.

Not gonna lie, we’re both quite ambitious with the timelines we’ve been setting for ourselves, but given we’d eventually like to make a living out of this, we want to work as hard as possible within reason.

With that being said, we’ll keep thanking each and every one of you that has supported and continues to support our work. 

Enjoy the rest of your week folks!

PS: I’d meant to write about Chapter 2 and some character creation stuff, but this came out instead, so… look forward to that coming soon.