Welcome to 2024!

Hello everyone and Happy New Year!

Wow, that was a wild December, I can't even begin to explain the amount of craziness it is when you are moving last second to a completely new area.

To all of you who were not aware, in Dcember my girlfriend and I lost internet to our Apartment complex. This caused us to complain after it hadn't returned in a week due to some road activity. We were put on a temporary internet plan that was pretty bad, but after some time we looked into a new area of town that we could move to.

After a lot of talk, we pulled the plug and decided to move to this place. It's a house we get to rent out now and it's really nice compared to our small apartment!

So we spent the middle of december moving everything out, and the last few weeks moving everything into the new place. Not to menion Christmas, New Years and other family events. Due to all this, I was not around much, but stayed in contact through Discord with most of you.

I want to thank you all for your patience, and officially announce that I'm sitting in my new office tonight and staring back at this lovely screen with a stupid grin on my face. I LOVE my new office, it's incredible. I feel like I will get a ton of work done in this room, and I can't wait to get started on some of the new features for the Midnight Channel.

So let's call this a monthly newletter, but also some sort of Year-in review I guess? If you wil indulge me, I would like to ramble and not be so formal with this message. I haven't had the time I typically do to format and structure this the same way I normally would.

First, lets start off with the Polls. As I mentioned in the previous motnhly newsletter, we had a poll for December! Personally, I was incredibly happy to see how well this went over, and I definitely will be incorporating more of these going forward. Thank you to all of you that voted, it's cool to see how Sumire will now be joining the crew because of all of you guys!

I had another poll on the discord that was for smaller stakes and just to see general interest. It also had a lot of attention and I"m happy to say that the Yoga outfit was the correct choice :D

So already for the next bigger update I will have the Sumire content to add, as well as the Yoga outfit. Keep in mind that Sumire will not be fully implemented but she will be included into the storyline. I have more work to complete on the current girls first, but now Sumire is included in that Roster, you should see some Sumire Portraits soon after I complete them.

Now onto Beta testing and Bug Testing. As I mentioned, I'm going to be opening up a bit of a Testing section for those that want to test current releases and help me with the builds. This will most likely be done through a seperate itch.io game page specifically for testing. I will also most likely only be allowing this for you Patrons, so call it a feature of your amazing donation :D

Next, I want to briefly talk about Hinomori Nights, I get this question a lot. I"m still going to be working on Hinomori Nights, as it's a game of my own creation and has no ties to any other IP. I have been focused on The Midnight Channel and will continue to do so, but I'm going to be getting help from my friend Sakaki  Prodigy to work on Hinomori Nights. She is taking on the writing, some art and the programming to an extent. This is to allow me to work on both at the same time at a decent pace. I will be overseeing the project, but she has some creative control with it now and I'm totally fine with that.

To anyone that has concerns about that, please know that Sakaki has helped me with my previous games arleady, and the formula here is no diffferent to how it has been.

Now I want to talk about Patreon Content. I am alwasy trying to think of ways that I can give all of you more content. I have been fairly loose with the content here and allowing it to be open on some messages or pages, but now that the following here has grown, and it's a new year, I feel like it's not fair to you Patrons that I keep it semi-open. For this year, I"m going to be making more posts ( including this one) closed to just the Patrons. That way I'm speaking directly to all of you amazing people who are keeping this project alive!

If any of you have any ideas of something I could be doing, please let me know. I'll say that I was interested in a Merch option, but I don't really know how I could feasibly do this. It would have to be of charcters that are completely original, or some sort of logo or soemthing. Not sure, but I do think it would be cool to have a hoodie or something that says The Midnight Channel on it or something to that effect. I would definitely have some late night programming sessions with that on.

Anyway, let me know what you guys think of that, and get back to me, I"m curious!

Alright, I have a LARGE laundry list of things I want to be adding into the game and I am very eager to get into it. Please message me if you have any questions or concernes about The Midnight Channel, and thank you again for the amazing year we previous had. This patreon has certainly had it's ups and down, especially 2023 as I had lost multiple projects for various reasons, but I feel very strong with the current state it's in and I"m excited to see where it goes from here!

Thank you all and Happy new year!

Talk soon,

~DarkDemarley