Midnight Paradise - Development Update #46 (Patreon)

Hey everyone

As you may have already heard on discord, I had to troubleshoot my PC quite a bit recently. It was overheating, because it was still on air cooling - at least the GPUs. One of them kept crashing the whole system because it reached dangerous temps. So I did what I postponed for a long time, built my first custom liquid cooling loop. Well, it wasn't easy, but it worked out in the end. Now both 3090s and the CPU is on water. It actually came with a nice performance increase because there is no thermal throttling at all now. This post would have come a week sooner, but the computer was still in pieces that time. Once I get the D-RGB situation in the case sorted (waiting for a splitter/controller to arrive) I'll post some pictures of the rig on discord.

Now onto the development news.
What I've been doing recently: Adopted a proper project management tool that will make the team's work more streamlined, will make communication easier and will result in overall faster completion time for work. With this I might be able to provide some status reports later in the forms of tasks remaining until release. We'll experiment and see how that goes.

I organized all the character files to speed up my workflow - this will save a lot of time in the future. It was getting chaotic and now everything is streamlined.
While I was at it I added new outfits for the ladies. Almost everyone is getting some new regular clothes, lingerie, bikini and some special stuff too. This is probably the most requested thing - to have more outfits in the game. You can see some of these in the preview images above, and there are a lot more.

I continued the work on backgrounds. I added variations to them where I could to make the game feel a bit more dynamic.
Example: Ruby will be doing various tasks in the office. When she's in her bedroom, sleeping in the morning she will be under the cover as she is now. On Saturdays however, she will be all naked without the covers after a night out partying.
Once you get close enough to her, you can convince her to always sleep nude like that. That will open up different options with her in the mornings when she's sleeping in.|
Again, with Joyce, once you're close enough with her, you can convince her that sunbathing topless is a much better idea than in full bikini. Once you have that unlocked, you will be able to toggle it in the game.
(These are illustrated above in the images section.)

And that takes me to the system that will control all this. I mentioned in my previous post that I'm going to share more information about how the new Sandbox Scenes will work.

There are already some points you can accumulate in the game, either for Connor or for the girls. Mainly, Connor's morality stat changes based on your decisions. Isabel has a lust stat, which determines which route you take with her (romantic or lustful) or Ruby's influence stat, which will affect how much you can influence her to become less of a brat and more obedient.

With the 0.17 update we will be introducing the Affection Points system - AP for short. Affection Points will serve the purpose of determining how close you are to a certain character and in turn what options you have in the sandbox.

You will gain affection points by interacting with the characters in the sandbox, on your phone and even in some story scenes. Once you get enough points, new options unlock for you in the sandbox. But once you hit a cap on the APs you can acquire, you have to complete more story scenes with the character. Reaching milestones in the story scenes will raise the AP cap for that character. That means you can start gaining more APs with them and you will unlock more scenes in the sandbox. This is in place so you cannot get to the sex scenes in sandbox mode while you are only at the beginning of the character's story scenes.

This will provide a balanced experience of the straightforward story scenes with some exploration in sandbox. 

The post is getting lengthy again so this will be it for now.
I know this is a long wait. But this is the largest and most complex update for Midnight Paradise to date. In my opinion, this will make it into a much, much better game overall when it comes to the final product and it is important to do this right.

Next, I will be talking about the dialogue and phone system expansions. Until then, take care guys!

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