nah.. your figures are do high, but it should be close to ~ $100,000.
To be honest, the renders are looking amazing. For Story+dialogues: I can't say much about it.. did not read the dialogues yet. Only tested the functionality of the game.
Coding: Not sure if he (Dr. Sins) hired the coders after or before the beta release, but experienced coder would have done a much better job. And I also assume that a experienced coder would not need a game template from the Unity store, The same for the dialogue system.
The beta was created in "Adventure Creator" + a lot of window-decoraction assets (eye-candy) from the Unity store.
Here is the link to Adventure Creator:
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Description:
Adventure Creator is the only asset you need to make a traditional 2D, 2.5D or 3D adventure game in Unity -
no coding required.
NO CODING REQUIRED!!! And this is exactly how the Beta looks like - no coder worked on it!
Recently I played a demo and the Dev told me, that he has no coding experience at all. Looking at his UI, Dialogue Box etc... I was able to see the same basic functions as in Midnight Paradise (without all the eye-candy of course). I asked him if he used Adventure Creator to make his game, and his answer was: "No, I coded everything in C++ myself!"
If a noob was able to code basic game functions as UI. dialog box etc.. why weren't two, let me repeat it, TWO CODERS, not able to code a functional UI with an working Save-/Loading-System?? Everything they want to re-work or implant for v0.0.2 should have been already in the beta version!
The only issue I have with Midnight Paradise is the lack of essential working basic functions! And for this I only can blame lewdlab's TWO CODERS! (Ofc only if they worked from the beginning on MP and did not join the team after the beta was build!)
But I'm optimistic that this game will turn out just fine with a nice story and amazing renders of "Landlady" and hot teacher!