MP Development Update #42 (Patreon)

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