2024 - Changes and What Comes Next (Patreon)

Hey everyone

It's been a while. Let's start with what happened with Patreon in December and early January.

As we were getting ready to make a little Holiday update for MP I got an email from the dreaded Patreon Support team and the page was suspended. Well, I though this isn't my first rodeo, I'll solve it in a week or so, like I did in the past. They told me what they wanted and I did as they asked.
I won't go into details about the ridiculousness of their complaint this time, because it really made my blood boil. Nonetheless, I did everything I could and although it wasn't solved within a week, it took about 2 weeks to get it done. But then - no reply. Turns out they were out of office and I had to wait 2 more weeks to get a response and get the page un-suspended at the beginning of January. You might have noticed there was no charge from my page and even the Patreon Discord bot didn't know what to do but it's fine.

So what changed?
We removed some small scenes from MP. That really was no big deal.
But the big change is that in order to get the page back, my only real option was to nuke DoD from Patreon. So I had gone through and deleted all 293 posts of DoD. One by one.
Honestly, that hurt a bit. It was my first game, kinda deleted some nice history and all that, and even though the game was reviewed about 3 times by Patreon already and considered to be okay, now this time it wasn't.
It is what it is I guess. You can still get DoD on Steam, GOG and my SubscribeStar. I won't link any of that, don't wanna risk another ban or some shit, but they can be found with a google search.

So obviously, I was dealing with this crap in December and it really made me frustrated and depressed. You know, trying to bounce back from being so shitty with the release gaps and we had a streak going, from May to November we did 0.17-0.23. We had monthly releases again and I was working my ass of then this happens, so I felt down.
But I was doing some other things I can't really talk about just yet. And I got inspired again, which is great.

So that's enough of a downer, let me talk about some positive stuff.

So last year - in 2023 - we added more than 4000 renders to Midnight Paradise and almost 300 animations (292 to be precise) and I don't even have any idea how many words of dialogue, but it's in the hundreds of thousands.

That's some good stuff. Those are not exactly rookie numbers, at least for me, so I'm proud of that and hats off to the team as well.

However, this Thursday marks the 5th anniversary of Midnight Paradise's 0.1 release. I know we took about a year to work on DoD: Definitive since then but still, MP has been going on for so long it's crazy. It's time to end it this year.

I could expand on the many side characters a lot more like the main girls and create some of the many crazy ideas I came up with, but this project cannot go on forever. Actually, the main story is finally where I want it to be. We're in the endgame now.
I have the Master Plan finished. Now I just need to execute it. It's long been in the making, and you could guess we are nearing the end when Midnight Paradise popped up on Steam as Coming Soon.

And I know a number of people will start bashing their keyboards about not enough Joyce content until the end and so on. To them: Don't worry bro, I got you ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
(It's not like I can finish the game in 2 updates or something so don't panic)

And to all of you, many thanks for sticking with me for another year. Here's to a less fucked year than the last one!

Oh, and I posted some previews for 0.24. It's nearly done so coming pretty soon.