This time a smaller Dev Log because I spent the last weeks only rendering and learning Blender.

In the last 3 weeks I rendered around 2150 renders for animations and yesterday I finished two "smaller" cinematics.
Which puts the render count on around 3200 in total now.
I now have to do one smaller cinematic and the slightly more challenging end cinematic.
And the rest of the stills, which is easy.

The total update will most likely go way over 5000 renders in total and at least 1000 of them are still renders.

And even with two PC's it still takes too long to call it "acceptable".
I am glad that I made the decision to cut the updates in half.

I am already doing 24/7 rendering but I will have to wait till I have a lot more power to go back on these bigger updates again and do them in a fraction of this time.

I am also making some huge improvements in Blender and I might even do future cinematics in Blender which would put every Daz animation to shame. (Ch4 and above).

Of all the renders I rendered since the last post I can only show like 5% because on almost all of them are the new classmates or it displays an "important" event.

One of the 8 new classmates will be previewed here today.
All of them have fleshed out stories that I was preparing before I released the first version of WiAB.
I am glad it's finally time to introduce them.

Let's cut right to the chase.
I will not showcase the other characters but I decided to show a first impression of her.

I cannot say anything about her because this would take away from the journey I am preparing. You will have to experience her yourself and draw your own conclusions.

As I am scrolling through my old renders, you can see that from update to update my style and approach changed and I was never really satisfied.. and to be honest, I will never be satisfied.

But what I like is a cinematic approach. Setting the scene into a certain mood while complementing it with the right music.
Sadly, Daz is very limiting in that regard and I am constantly hitting the "Daz just can't do this" line but I am trying to press out of Daz what I can till I finally swap completely to Blender.

As I already said in the last dev log, Chapter 3 will set a lot of gears in motion and the first small bonds can be created.


I was hesitating if I should show off such a render here but I decided to do it as she is a desired girl and this render here still leaves the mystery intact.


I would love to preview one of the cinematics I finished here because the lyrics there would perfectly sum up Chapter 3.
But, this cinematic shows way too much for a preview.

There will be a Dev Log #6 with some previews but after that, I will release the update.

Thank you for putting your trust in me during these unpredictable times.
Have a good day!

- Ocean

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