Midnight Paradise [Lewdlab] (Полуночный Рай)

Midnight Paradise - Development Update #44




Hey everyone

I haven't posted in a while but that doesn't mean the team wasn't working. The 0.16 update is coming soon.
As you probably already know, there is a war in Ukraine. Most of you also know I'm from Europe, so it hits a bit too close to home. I couldn't even imagine what the people of Ukraine have to go through. I'm keeping up with the news daily and it's making me depressed. I didn't feel like talking much here.

About work:
Added some more stuff for 0.16 than the initial plans. I worked on Natsuko's apartment and added some content that will be expanded in the future there. Now you can also talk to her and she will finally reveal more stuff. Not too much though because, well, that would end badly for Connor.
However, Sofia's involvement will put the main story into gear finally. I admit I was waiting too long on that one, but to be fair, this is a long game.

The update will have around 200 renders and 20 animations. I was planning for a lot less and a faster release, but I just kept adding little things again.
There are already phone events implemented and you can start collecting the pictures from the girls. More and more phone messages will be implemented with each update, even going back starting from the beginning of the game.

That's all for now, I'll talk to you guys soon when I bring the new update.

And as always, thank you for your great support!
-Dr Sin

Midnight Paradise - Development Update #43



Hey everyone

We've been working to bring you the 0.16 update of Midnight Paradise. The main feature of the update will be the new phone. You can see a little video of it in action here.
Main features of the phone will be:
- Text messages
You will be able to send and receive messages from the girls. They can even send you pictures if you play your cards right. These will be added to the phone's photo gallery.
- Photo Gallery
The images here will be the ones you get from the girls by text or sometimes Connor will take a photo of a girl. They will be added to the phone gallery and will only be viewable from there. Can you collect them all? ;)
- Contacts / Stats
You can check the points for each character here along with some additional info. For example you can see lust points for Isabel or influence points for Ruby. You'll also see your own morality score here as well.
- Wallpaper Selection
By progressing with the girls you will unlock their wallpapers, which you can set for the phone background. You can have your favorite character set as the background. And of course the further you go with the girl the spicier the pictures. Later on when achievements are implemented into the game getting an achievement can have a wallpaper reward too.
We are mainly focusing on this for 0.16 but there are also regular scenes. The main story progresses further, more content with Ms Jane as the tutoring storyline is getting close to its finale, Sofia and her progression gets integrated into the main story and she will get more screen time going forward and Joyce makes an appearance in the 0.16 update as well, and this time not in an Elite scene.
We've also implemented starting points up to update 0.15. So you can start a new game from any point in the game. We are currently testing this and if no problems occur this will make it into the 0.16 update as well.
This is mainly a feature/tech update and it will make the final game a lot better and brings it closer to my vision I've talked about in my previous development update.
That's all for now, and if you're in the Elite tier don't forget to vote in the poll for the Elite scene, it's live!

And as always, a huge thank you for your great support!
-Dr Sin

MP Development Update #42



Hey everyone

Another quick weekly update.
Last week we've been setting up a few technical things with the new crew and that's done so I've gone into a bit of a lone wolf mode to finish up things before the release of 0.15
This week I'm finalizing scenes and writing. It's going good so far and I'm looking forward to the upcoming release. I can see the finish line. To speed up the process a bit further I might get a little help with the writing as well.
I'm sitting here thinking about what to include in this post about the upcoming update, but I can't really say stuff that hasn't been said already. So I guess I'll talk about something different.

Back in the day when Midnight Paradise was still just an idea it was supposed to be a lot different from what it is today. And that bothered me for a long while.
The reason it's the way it is today is because, well, most things don't go as planned and I had to make decisions that would "put out the fires" short term but compromised on long term vision. This mainly happened during the time of the initial disaster of 0.1 - 0.3
After that I wanted to get back to the roots as close as possible, because that was the comfortable place to be, that was home turf. And while render quality increased drastically compared to Dreams of Desire, the game didn't evolve as much as I wanted it to.
My main issue is that it's not utilizing the sandbox element enough. I don't play much games nowadays aside from a select few, but what I always liked about games was the little exploration of unlocking new locations, checking on characters and see if there's anything new to do with them, checking back periodically as the main story moved forward. And when there was something new unlocked and I discovered it, it felt great. I think this is what's missing from MP. I'm not talking about anything grindy here, where you have to raise stats by mindless clicking for 20 minutes to unlock a new scene.
It would be cool to have smaller scenes scattered throughout the game that can be reached by free interaction with the characters. Do you guys think that would be good too, or is it just me?

Well, that is something a lot more closer to my initial vision of MP. Making things a bit more interactive and fun.
This is a type of content I think the game could greatly benefit from and it's also a type of content I personally want to make too, so this is a direction I'll be heading towards in the future. Just to be clear, this won't stand in the way of the normal scenes I've been making so far, just an addition.
I hope you didn't mind my little rambling about this. Well, that's it from me for now. Talk to you guys soon!

And as always, thank you for your great support!
-Dr Sin

MP Development Update #41



Hey everyone

So a quick update about what happened in the last 1 week.
Thanks to my last post, many talented coders applied to be on the MP development team and we finally concluded the process. Now we have enough manpower to handle the updates and even upgrade the game on certain aspects.
There are a lot of things I wanted to add or modify to be better in the game, but there was never enough capacity for it. Now it seems like we'll have great results and Midnight Paradise will look and feel a lot more like I imagined it.

For example, I was amazed by the new phone system I received from one of our new coders. I'm not going to add it into the upcoming update, because we will do more tweaks and testing with it, and I also wanna make a decent chunk of content for it before we add it, but I'm sure it will make it into the 0.16 update. I'll show more of that later as we get closer to that of course. I'm really happy with this positive turn of events and now that we are assembled, we'll put things in motion and work on releasing 0.15 as soon as possible.
I'll do more regular progress updates until then.

And as always, thank you for your support.
-Dr Sin

MP - Development Update #40




Hey everyone
Just posting a quick update about what's been up lately.

We managed to find someone who will be able to do programming for Midnight Paradise long term. The new programmer can only start working next week though, so we still have a big chunk of work ahead of us. He's studying the code base of the game, and there's a lot to go over. I'll be working with him closely to make sure we can tackle everything.
MP isn't as simple of a project as DoD, so of course it takes a bit of time to adjust and get familiar with how the game was built so far.

I also managed struck a deal with a different coder who specializes in Renpy (the game engine Midnight Paradise uses) to build features as needed for MP. The first one of these will be a new phone system, maybe you've already seen something like that in other adult games. Work on this will also start next week, we'll see how long it takes to complete but it's not mandatory for the next release. If it's not done, we'll just put it in 0.16 Our designer (who made the new UI for DoD: DE) is already working on the user interface assets for the phone system.
The plan is that you'll be able to receive messages from characters and reply to them, get notifications to start a new objective (more in this in a second), check your morality stat and finally check the girls' stats. Oh, and of course with the phone you can receive nudes from the girls.
I always wanted MP to be more "modular" than DoD. What I mean is, adding some scenes or storylines at different parts of the game shouldn't be an issue. And while that was the plan, a long of things didn't go as I wanted at first, and the short term solutions got in the way of the long term plans.
The biggest criticism I receive is always - there's not enough sex. And I get that, I've been pretty scarce with that in MP, especially in the beginning.
With this phone system and some clever scene design, I'm planning to add quests or scenes into the earlier parts of the game. I know the long time players are always viewing games developed on Patreon from update to update and judging by that. However, on my side, I'm always looking at how it will all turn out at the end and what the finished game will be. At this point I'm just rambling - the main takeaway here is that I'll add more sex scenes to the earlier parts of the game based on the feedback.
I'm doing this in a way that it won't affect how you play the game, it will feel like regular new scenes if you've been playing along the updates.

On another topic, I finally got 2 doses of the vaccine. Been a little tired lately, not sure if there's a correlation, but otherwise I'm fine. I mentioned in an other post a long time ago that I'm learning new stuff. Stuff to make better games down the line. That stopped for a while, but I'm picking things back up. Hopefully I can keep doing it and improve my work in the future.
This post was a bit more chaotic than usual, sorry about that. I'll post additional info after the coding work starts.

And as always, thank you for your support!
-Dr Sin

MP - Development Update #39 [IMPORTANT]




Hey everyone
I bring not so good news this time. The update is delayed for a bit.

I know some people will get angry over this and I'm sorry, but I'll explain the situation. There have been a number of issues recently that are causing this delay.

As you may or may not know, the main coder on the project is Lain. He's been unresponsive for 12 days now. I can't reach him at all. I don't know what's causing this and I hope nothing bad happened. But this is not the first or the second time this happened and I can't wait any longer. So I won't be working together with Lain anymore.

Now the 'team' doesn't have a coder. 'Team' because it's just Risael and me now. If it was just a release with regular scenes I could manage the implementation of them into the game but this update features new locations and minigames in a system I didn't create. And in the long run, someone who specializes in programming will always do it 10x faster than I could and most likely a lot better. So I do what I do, making renders and animations and I'll be hiring someone to do the coding.
Thanks to Lain for helping with the project for as long as he did.

Now, my first thought was to get someone to jump in and help out with the project ASAP and just rush it somehow. But no more half measures. I have promising candidates for the job and I'm going to make sure I find someone who we can work together with as a great team, someone who I can plan with long term.

The other issues have been on the technical side, my old PC which has been rendering most of the DoD: DE animations is acting up, along with my NAS which provides physical backups of my work files and handles the file sharing between the render nodes.

After a few days of futile attempts, I managed to fix the NAS issue today. I'll fix the old PC as well so it can keep on rendering the juicy animations.
So it's been rough lately, but it is what it is guys. I'm sorry about the delay but these things happen. I'm hiring someone as soon as possible and we'll get back on track. I'll keep you in the loop about it.
I know it doesn't fix things, but I brought some previews, you can check them out above.
The update slips over to December, however I'd like to reassure everyone that everybody who is a Patron $10 and above will get the update in December. Will bring it to you as soon as possible. Thank you for your understanding.

And as always, thank you for you support!
-Dr Sin

Trailer is out! Steam Store Page is LIVE!



Hey everyone! I have some good news!

The Dreams of Desire: Definitive Edition Steam Store page is live!
You can check it out here.

Also, that means the trailer is out, which you can either watch on the steam store page, or on YouTube. Here's the YouTube link. (it was a bit spicy for Youtube ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) so it got age restricted, but if you're logged in you can watch it)

Now a little bit about this milestone and the development.

The trailer took a lot of really hard work to make. At some point, I scrapped the entire thing and started from scratch, because it wasn't up to the quality you're used to seeing from me. And I think it was worth it to start over, because I'm satisfied with the result. I hope you like it too!

About development: we're 15 days away from release, so we are doing the finishing touches and using this time to add as much bonus stuff into the game for you as we can.
You can expect many hot scenes both at the ending, and scattered in between the regular episodes.

I'm so excited to have my first game out on Steam soon.
I'll leave the big wall of text for when the game is actually released, so I'm keeping this post short.
Now go and wishlist the game on steam and watch the trailer!

Thank you for sticking with me guys, it's really coming soon now:)

And as always, thank you for your great support!
-Dr Sin

Checking in

Hey everyone

Just wanted to post something so you can see I'm here and share what I'm working on.

Last week I started working on the trailer and that's still what I'm doing. It's an unusual task because I've never made a long a video. Putting a scene together in the game is quite different, because when you're putting up a trailer, you have to condense as much good stuff into a single minute as possible while also making it appealing and of course cool looking.

This, as many other tasks can be approached in different ways. Either just record some gameplay footage and call it a day, spend dev time elsewhere, or fully commit and try to make it as awesome as possible.

I think you can guess which approach I'm taking. It's a unique challenge and I'm trying to nail this. I've had tons of ideas that I've scrapped already, but looks like it's coming to a conclusion. I wanna be done with it this week and move on to other things on the list.

I hope I can show it to you soon.

Otherwise, not much is happening outside of work. I went to the gym 3 times last week, I'm satisfied with that. It helps a lot with my mood. Maybe I'll become Dr Chad in the future? Probably not, but it's all good :)

That's all from me for now. It's a short post, but it's probably best if I don't write a wall of text every time. I'll let you guys know how things are going.

And as always, thank you for your support.
-Dr Sin

I'm not dead



Hey everyone

Where do I even begin...
As you have noticed, there's been a lack of posts lately and that understandably birthed some confusion.
So in fact, as the title says, I'm not dead. If you are a member on the Lewdlab Discord Server you already know that. It's a good idea to hop in, you can see I'm online there and I usually answer questions there, if it's a legit question of course. Here's the invite link.

You probably want to know what's been going on lately and why the radio silence here.
It's a complex issue and I'll try to do my best to break it down.

First of all, I have to admit that I bit off more than I could chew with DoD: DE
I thought I'd get this done in no time and move on with MP. I was wrong.
Just to put in in perspective: Midnight Paradise so far has 178 animations, and a big chunk of that came this year with the 0.14 release. For Dreams of Desire: Definitive Edition I have made over 450 animations already, and more on the way, it's going to be above 500.

That's actually a gargantuan task in itself, but there's a ton more work going into it. It really shows the game wasn't made with a steam release in mind. Making sure there isn't anything in the game that can cause problems down the line with steam and changing those is another thing and of course creating the new content are all very big tasks. And the perfectionist in me doesn't let me half-ass it.

Now the scope of the work alone wouldn't be that big of an issue. And this isn't why I have been quiet lately. In my "prime days", 4 years ago I could have chewed through this maybe not super fast, but fast enough for it not to cause problems.
But we're not in 2017 anymore and here comes the second part of the problem.
The problem - which is a culmination of the past 4 years - is burnout. A lot of artists and content creators suffer from this and I didn't realize that's what has been going on with me at first.
Spending most of last year in quarantine only made it worse and add on top of all that all my health issues this year. I don't like to talk about that because I don't want to seem like a whiny little bitch. But it's been really taxing mentally and physically, especially the damn covid, and that's only one item on the list. I've seen people say I'm lying about my health or that who cares if I'm sick, they go to work when they are sick too. So I rarely share anything about what's actually happening to me, but let me tell you, it's been a rough year so far.

Now a bit about the psychological part of things:

Ever since my whole journey as an adult games dev started, I've had a constant level of stress. There's always the next deadline, there's always the competition to beat, there's always something going wrong. It is a high stress job, at least for me.
But the worst is the feeling that if I ever stop to take a break, I'll lose it all. The fans, the momentum, my creativity - my job. Like a voice in my head was constantly shaming me every time I was trying to do something that's not work. In the end I always felt guilty when I was away from the computer, but feeling drained and trapped when I wasn't.
And in the end, look where that lead me.
I stopped releasing anyway because this whole thing paralyzed me. This caused me to not post, partly because I was depressed, and partly because I couldn't offer you guys something new and flashy in a post, and I didn't want to post about not getting work done fast enough.
Now this doesn't mean I didn't work these past months. It's just that some days I did good progress, but on other days I considered my progress garbage. I set internal release dates though for the past few months that I always had to push back. The intent was there, but I wasn't in a good enough state to fulfill it.

What am I doing to restore everything to 100% ?
First of all, I took a week off. I packed up my stuff and left the country. I've been to museums, seen some churches, and just generally been outside a lot. That did wonders to me. I came back refreshed and refueled.

Second, I'm not taking any chances and I'm going back to therapy. I've told myself I'll go this past year, but I didn't make myself commit. Now I did, I'm starting tomorrow. It has helped in the past and I'm sure it will help again.

Third, I'm adapting a work schedule that's more fitting to the goal of reducing constant stress. The goal here is that you wouldn't notice this change if I wasn't telling you about it, meaning in the future I'd release new content consistently, but it'd be less stressful to me. This is something like not working on Sundays and distributing the workload smarter.
I'm also making other changes to my lifestyle to make sure this won't happen again.
I'm feeling a lot better now... You know what - I actually feel pretty good now. I'm having the itch again, to make new content. Ideas are coming to me again. It feels good to be back.
That being said, I owe you guys an apology. I've been keeping you in the dark, although not intentionally, and I'm sorry.

But to end this post on a positive note:
The release date of Dreams of Desire: Definitive Edition is the 20th of October.
I know that date isn't close, but at least I can assure you: whatever happens, DoD: DE is getting released on that date and it will be followed closely with an MP release.

And as always, thank you for your great support!
-Dr Sin​

News Returns!




Hey everyone

It's been a while!
Well, I've been busy af lately. My schedule will get better and better from now on (I mentioned I have some things going on in my private life that need a lot of attention a few posts back).
And of course I'm working on the new scenes for DoD:DE, as you can see from the little previews in the post.

I was like - I'm going to make some short but sweet scenes... Well, as usual, I ended up with things like the dinner scene, which is 66 renders long and has 18 animations, with a variety of fetishes and action for everyone.
So from now on I'll try to make it brief and not create giant scenes because I know you're all waiting for DoD:DE and for me to return to MP as soon as possible.

From this point forward in the post there will be some spoilers about Dreams of Desire's story, so if you haven't finished the game yet, proceed at your own risk.

In these previews you see the scenes that come after the endings. If you get Tracy's ending, you'll be able to spend some quality time with her in a romantic setting, but I don't want to spoil the whole thing. You'll have plenty of options with her.
Right now the most difficult character to deal with is Alice. She's affected by the reworked 'endgame' scenes, because I felt the revelation was weak compared to the rest of the game. Looks like I'll completely scrap the last warehouse scenes too and make something else - or reword that scene completely. I feel like that was rushed and clunky, so hopefully the new version will be a better experience.

In the poll where I asked you guys if you want more ending content or more in the middle of the game type of content, it was in favor of both. Well, I should have expected that:)
So there are some short scenes that can be added into the middle of the game and they won't disturb the story.
Oh and by the way, I really liked your comments on the last post about the type of content you'd like to see. I can't promise all of them in DoD:DE, but if it doesn't make it in that, it might make it into Midnight Paradise.
That's all for now and I'll try to be less silent and more active with posts.

And as always, thank you for your great support!