Hello there Strangers,
This devlog was supposed to come out at the end of last month. I had started writing it back then, telling you all about how we were very excited about all the insane progress we managed to get through the holidays, how hopeful we were for the future, and how close we were to releasing an early version for our beta testers. And then, that same week, Grogu’s PC decided the hot render queue nights in the South American summer were just too much to handle and gave up. This is the… third? time that this has happened since the beginning of this chapter's development, and it was yet again devastating not only in regards to SoP but also because Grogu uses his PC for work as well. I’ll pass him the mic to go into some of the more technical stuff, because it’s way more complicated (and just worse in general) than I’m making it up to be.
Grogu: I was very fortunate to have received some funds to cover a big part of it. After taking the PC to the repair service, we found that the issue was most likely caused by unstable voltage from the power supply, triggered by several electrical instability problems where I live. The PC was connected directly to the wall, and a voltage fluctuation appears to have caused a short circuit on the motherboard, which in turn damaged the GPU and RAM. Eventually, the motherboard itself stopped working entirely.
I had to set aside a significant amount of money for this, and the repair service took quite some time to return the remaining parts to me. I then bought a second-hand graphics card just to be able to keep making progress (my main GPU is still at the repair service). It worked… until today. The same issue happened again, which likely means there’s still an underlying electrical problem that hasn’t been fully resolved, and even writing this is incredibly frustrating.
To make things worse, the repair cost for my main GPU is extremely high, nearly the price of buying a new graphics card with lower VRAM. Considering the current economic situation here, that’s not a small expense.
Until I can save enough for the repairs and costs of new parts I can’t do anything. At this point, I’m mostly glad the hard drives are safe, which means all the progress I’ve made for SoP and for my work are still there. But needless to say, these were all very expensive unexpected expenses for me, not to mention Argentina has been hitting new lows in regards to its economy which makes this all the more shitty.
Let me make this clear: This is not me asking for fund raising help, this is just information. The kind of news we hate sharing, but we have to, in order to keep you in the loop. We are very well aware of how present the ghost of abandoned games is in this community, and every setback makes it all the more difficult to answer the question of: but then when is Chapter 3 coming out? So we hope at least this update sheds some light on what’s going on with us.
Gizmo: On the writing side, this monster of a chapter is pretty much finished. And I know usually people call texts monsters when they're really long but, in this case, it's in more of a literal sense. Since its very conception, SoP had always been my refuge, my passion project to go back to when feeling burnt out from work and life, and these ongoing unexpected setbacks have turned it into another haunting source of stress for both of us - which made it incredibly difficult to work on. One good thing I can say that came out of this last setback was the fact that I’ve started learning RenPy in order to help Grogu move things forward faster and… yeah that’s pretty much it. It’s tough to have these many negative feelings attached to something that we love so much, so believe me when I say there’s no one who wants this chapter to be out already more than us.
Writing gloomy dev logs is never fun, but right now we’re simply going through the darkest part of the tunnel knowing there’s still light at the very, very far end of it, trying to punch every new boulder out of the way. Pretty renders do make for a scenic view though.
We hope you're all doing good on your side, if you have any silly (or technichal, or any kind of) questions for us you can leave them in the comments so we can fingir demencia for a little while in another little Q&A, or you can ask on the corresponding channels on our discord server.
Just know we're doing the best we can with every challange we've encountered and, as always, we are forever grateful for your support and good vibes.
Have a good day.
-GGS