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Hey everyone
This post is a bit different than usual. I have some thoughts in my head and I think I should share them with you.
Disclaimer: I'm rambling a lot in this post, and it's a long one so I'm sorry about that. There isn't any important info about the release so you can skip this post if you don't like walls of text.
Maybe some of you are here since the beginning, since the DoD days. Those people remember what it was like back then.
Lately I've been thinking a lot about my work then and now. I recently looked at the renders I did 3 years ago... and man I've come a long way.
So basically I was comparing my current work to my work 3 years ago. And not just the beauty of the images I create but the game, the speed I'm working at, the frequency of the updates and so on.
So back then, things seemed to go faster. Update every month, around 270 new images each update. Story is flowing nicely. All seems good.
Nowadays I'm reading things like everything is progressing slowly, there is a long time between updates (I'm trying to remedy that with bringing back the monthly updates).
Now that's true, things are going slower than in the Dreams of Desire days. Okay, so why is that, I thought.
Well, first of all, I remember working day and night back then. Talking about my game with everyone, thinking about my game all the time. For a little over 1.5 years I never stopped. I remember having so much back pain from sitting all that time in front of the PC that I put a pillow in front of the desk and I worked while kneeling instead.
Now obviously this is not something anyone can keep up for long. At least I think I can't. It was inhuman and I'm amazed that I was doing it for so long.
Nowadays I still put in the hours, but the difference is that I actually want to be away from the computer too. I don't talk about Midnight Paradise to everybody now and not every waking moment is spent by thinking about it. It doesn't mean I don't like MP, because I do. That's just how it is now.
Now there are some very big differences in the technical things as well.
Midnight Paradise is bigger in every way than Dreams of Desire.
The cast is way bigger. The main girls were all introduced at the first release (instead of slowly easing them in like in DoD). The main story doesn't have that much of a connection with the household (well, not yet) as it was with DoD so MP flows differently.
I knew I was making a lot of characters for MP, but when I thought I'd do that I had a different concept in mind about the scenes. I wanted to move a bit away from the DoD format and not have each conversation fully rendered, but instead I was going to use 'sprites' for the conversations and only full images for H scenes and important story events. Well, that didn't work out...
But anyways... The 2 main things are the improved image quality and Connor.
So looking back, the difference between my current and my old work is huge. Right now I'm making objectively much, much better images. So as you can probably guess, more quality takes more time.
The other thing is Connor as a main character. The DoD MC was a nameless, faceless character. It was intentional. But never showing his face meant I never had to work on him in the scenes - while also the majority of the images were POV shots.
This time however, there is Connor. One more character to place and pose and do facial expressions for in every scene. POV shots are now rare, so I'm spending a lot of time figuring out and playing with camera angles. Then of course, I'm adjusting the lighting for almost every different camera angle so each render looks the best it can. This increases the amount of time it takes to make the scenes tremendously.
Oh and also, I do animations now. They take up a lot of dev time.
I understand people want more content and want it faster in this day and age. But for me, the most important thing is that I release a game with imagery that's the best I'm currently capable of making. Because otherwise I wouldn't be satisfied with my work and because I think you guys deserve the best I can make.
Well, I've gone on long enough already. If you read it all the way, props to you and thank you for taking the time to read it.
You guys are awesome, and thank you for supporting me along this long journey!
-Dr Sin
