Beach Paradise Devlog 3/30/23 (Patreon)

In my previous devblog, I suggested that a new version should be released at the end of the month. That was a month ago. The reason for this is simple: the scope of the update has increased by an order of magnitude.

The next update will be the largest update I've ever made for Beach Paradise. It will restructure the entire project and improve the experience from just about every conceivable angle. I've spoiled some things already, but this time around I wanted to try something new and let my next update surprise you.

In spite of that, I don't want to keep people completely in the dark. Work is hard and ongoing. I'd like to unveil everything when I'm either right on the cusp of release or releasing the update itself, but before that there are things I'd like to discuss that could be controversial.

Namely, the name of the mod itself! Beach Paradise is such an old project now, in mod years anyways! Truth be told, I didn't put a lot of thought into the name at the time, and there are some significant drawbacks to it. The main one is simply that the name is, well, very generic. That creates more than an aesthetic problem as it's conflated with such generic search terms that simply searching "Beach Paradise" on search engines doesn't yield anything relevant to us. It would be sad to dump the name, but I feel like it could use a rebranding if only to become easier to search. I'm open to suggestions.

It's been a few months now since I've opened the Patreon page, and while there are hard lines I don't want to cross, I'd like to open up some reasonable patron rewards to give people incentive to support me, with the caveat of not restricting access to the mod in any way, this means no paywalling the mod, no exclusive content, no "early access" to the mod, essentially nothing that would make people feel compelled to donate. I believe this would frustrate people but above all else be immoral. Some ideas I have would be along the lines of having costume suggestions, etc..

That's all for now I'm afraid. As usual, feedback is appreciated!