VN Ren'Py Strangers on Paper [Development Thread]

[ostrogotihichun]

congratulation on the release
when it will have a public release?

 

[gloomyghost]

congratulation on the release
when it will have a public release?

Thank you so much! It's coming out this Thursday, May 25th.

 

[gloomyghost]

Strangers On Paper Chapter 1: Crisistunity is finally out!

Check it out here.

We hope you enjoy it and, if you haven't joined yet, we kindly invite you to join

You must be registered to see the links

!

 

[quinfax]

Congratulations on your first release.

 

[gloomyghost]

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.

​

 

[omega_rugal]

scenes with heels?

 

[gloomyghost]

Congratulations on your first release.

Thank you so much! We hope it was worth the wait!

scenes with heels?

Hi there! We are not planning on including that content in our game. If you are curious about other type of content, you can check out the list of planned/not planned tags here.

 

[gloomyghost]

Upon releasing Chapter 1 of Strangers on Paper, we have collected some questions we’ve seen pop up in different places and thought we could answer them all in one post for your convenience.

• What kind of sexual content are you planning to include in this game?
  Let’s get this out of the way first. SOP is not a story about sex. It is a story with sex, but it doesn’t set out to explore kinks specifically, so the content here will be on the tamer side. If you want us to get really specific about it, upon seeing DiPeppo include a set of tags that are planned and those that will not be in his game
  You must be registered to see the links
  , we decided to do something similar and let people know from the get-go what they’re getting into. You can check them out
  You must be registered to see the links
  .
• But why isn’t this particular content that I like included in your game?
  We consider ourselves sex positive individuals and have nothing against other games depicting your preferences, we just didn’t feel that type of content fits the story we are telling here. If you’re having trouble finding the right game for you, we recommend you check out r/AVN_Lovers if you haven’t already - they have quite extensive lists of recommendations and it’s a very positive and respectful community.
• I don’t like any kind of LGBTQ+ content. Can I turn it off so I don’t have to see it?
  Although neither of the main relationships are queer, some characters depicted in the story are. We will not be focusing on those relationships in detail, but you may find conversations about this and images of them engaging in some sort of romantic displays of affection. If this is something you would like to absolutely avoid, then maybe this isn’t the game for you.
• What does “drama” stand for in SOP? Should I run to the store for tissues?
  This is a tough question to answer. We did not set out to make a tearjerker or an overdramatic story. We use the term “drama” because that is the one that we consider the closest to the nature of SOP, but depending on your personal experience it may or may not elicit crocodile tears at one point or another.
• Do you have the whole story planned out already? How long is it going to be?
  The same day I came up with the plot and characters, I wrote a quick summary for each chapter and each ending. Of course, I continue to edit these the more I write, but we have a very clear direction of where each story will go. The only thing that has not been that clear lately is whether there will be 3 or 4 chapters. Some characters have been overly stubborn to open up and it may take them a little bit longer than I initially thought.
• Are you going to add more love interests?
  The short answer is “no”. The answer I like the best is “maybe”. We’ve got some ideas but it all really depends on public reception, financial support, time and, most of all, our will to make it happen.
• Next update when?!
  You will have an approximate date for chapter 2 in about a month. We’re doing our best to ensure that they will not take too long, but after all we’re just two people working on this in our free time. We will always keep you updated and be as transparent as possible regarding the development of the game.
• Why do you hate beer/ewoks/romance/crying/shoes/etc?
  Our characters’ opinions do not reflect our own, they reflect their own experiences and states at the time the story takes place. Well, except for the ewoks thing. They’re the best and you can’t convince me otherwise.

We hope this helped you have a clearer picture of our game. If you have other rendering/writing-specific questions, we may do another one of these in the future, or whole dev logs on aspects that may be interesting to share - kinda like we’ve been doing.

• Bonus question: Did you really take the chapter 1 title word from The Simpsons?
  I have no regrets.

 

[kibaris]

I loved this first release, just "disappointed" when I saw there would only be 3 chapters + epilogue but it's a nice little story with some darker themes and a little touch of humor.

Few characters but their development is really well handled for a first chapter of this size, even if some of the themes speak to me personally, so it helps me get attached to the characters too + beautiful renders and soundtrack as well .

So congratulations for this first release, i wish you all the best for your future games and I can't wait to discover the next chapters.^^

 

[NebulousShooter]

The ending montage song is still stuck in my head, one week later

 

[gloomyghost]

Strangers on Paper - DevLog #15 - Progress Update

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.

 

[NME Artworks]

I loved this. Becca 4 lyfe.