Category: Game Development

​I’ll state right at the top that a significant motivator for the writing of this post is simply to push Tourney of Tyranny Part 1​ back into visibility for my audience. I’ll admit that here and now: this is a marketing exercise. As much as Tourney of Tyranny​ is a labour of love, it’s also a product that cost money for me to create, and the more money I make back from the sales of said product, the easier it is for me to justify continuing to make products like it. 

However, I’d also like to take this opportunity to write a little bit about WHY I’m bothering to perform this kind of exercise, when in the past I’ve tended to let our releases speak for themselves. The short answer: Tourney of Tyranny, due to the Payment-Processor-Unfriendly nature of its sexual content, needs extra conscious support in order to receive the same visibility our other projects enjoy.

You might have noticed this in Tourney of Tyranny’s page copy, but I’m even being coy about the nature of said sexual content (hereafter referred to as “The Kink”) because there are many documented instances of crowdfunding platforms like Patreon stalking the social feeds of people using their services and denying them said services for off-platform violations. Our Patreon income is pretty insignificant at the moment, but with things as dire as they are at the moment in terms of ways you can make money from pornography, it pays to be circumspect. Suffice it to say that The Kink is frequently characterized by glowing eyes, swirly pupils, and characters being compelled by some mixture of fantastical powers, weird science, or made-up pheromones into performing acts that they might not otherwise have performed. We all know what’s being referred to now, yes?

Continue reading “Try Purchasing Tourney of Tyranny, Please” →

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PICTURED: Jacqueline going full Mom Mode on Aster and Luca.

On Endings

One of the more-frequent criticisms I see of Opportunity, and the one that I actually agree with the most, is that it doesn’t have a proper ending. For all the thought and care that went into the game, very little was spared for how I actually wanted to tie things off at the very end. My original vision for Opportunity had been to have it be a series comprised of very short “episodes” – I had about eight or nine sketched out in the initial concept document. This plan was changed after TinyHat got in touch about wanting to get the game on Steam, because that entailed combining the first three chapters into one so that the early-access version would have enough content to feel substantial. After that, we were just working as fast as we possibly could the whole time, with very little thought left over for long-term planning.

However, after two and a half years of working on the thing, it HAD to end. There simply wasn’t any more story to tell after chapter 5, not really. Such character arcs as there were had all completed, the whole cast was in a pretty good place, and introducing any new plot elements would have been akin to starting an entirely new story anyway. I could have just ended things right at the end of the big orgy in chapter 5, but I knew I needed to at least TRY to put a bow on everything.

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 10: That’s All, Folks!” →

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PICTURED: Jacqueline sending Roman a spicy selfie, from Opportunity’s second chapter.

You know how it is. Sometimes you want to write about something but the subject just doesn’t have the legs to be made into a full-length essay. Luckily, there are enough of those not-quite-essay-length topics left over for Opportunity that I think I can cobble them together into a proper post! Also, I apologize for the delay in getting this one out, but it turns out that launching a video game, and then launching a fundraiser for the next issue of your anthology, and then getting emergency gall bladder removal surgery all in the same one-month span can really throw a spanner in the works of your blogging schedule! Who knew!

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 9: Fashion, Food, and Fun” →

PICTURED: An intimate scene between Roman and Jacqueline from Opportunity’s fifth chapter.

One would think that “showing when sex happens” would be the easiest part of creating any kind of pornographic material. At the end of the day that’s the POINT of the whole thing, right? To make a piece of art where sex takes centre stage? Yes, but that’s also what makes it difficult – it’s the part that’s most important to get right. When you’re making porn, and particularly when you’re making a porn GAME, there are a great number of things that you have to consider before you start slapping meat together. One thing to note at the top: although this segment does talk a fair amount about the decisions I made regarding the porn in Opportunity, it’s mixed in with much more general thoughts about porn and porn game development. Fair warning!

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 8: Getting Sexual With It” →

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PICTURED: A snippet of Ren’Py script from the first chapter of Opportunity.

Fair warning up top: this portion of the retrospective will likely contain very few surprises if you’ve got an experience or familiarity with game development. It turns out that making video games is still making video games even when there’s porn in them! Nevertheless, I’m going to do my best to show you how a game like Opportunity might come together from start to finish (I’ll note that I’m also using a very similar flow for the updates on Monstrous Liberation, although obviously those aren’t EXACTLY analogous due to their differing story structure). I promise to also try my best to make it entertaining, though I’ll say up top what anyone who’s ever made a game knows: making games, even porn games, is pretty hard and boring almost all of the time. However, to paraphrase Defunctland‘s Kevin Perjurer: the only thing I hate worse than making a game is NOT making a game.

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 7: The Development Process” →

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PICTURED: Jacqueline, Sasha, and Olive cuddling in a hotel bed after an impromptu hotel-room three-way.

Sasha

Sasha might not have been originally envisioned as the character who would go on to become the protagonist of BP Games’s next title, but it’s not hard to see how we got there. Sasha exudes Main Character Energy, bursting into Opportunity with probably the most going on of any of the secondary characters. She’s a cosplayer! She’s also a popular streamer and internet personality! She’s got a bunch of weird messy roommates! She’s got pronouns AND blue hair! She does a little >:3 smile! How could Pacha and I NOT want to spend more time getting to know her?

Functionally, Sasha came about as a character when I realized that since the anime convention Jackie and Olive were attending in chapter 5 was all about Jackie reconnecting with one of her youthful passions, it made sense for that reconnection to be personified by a younger woman who might remind Jackie of herself. It also gave me someone to put into cosplay of an off-brand Nanami from Revolutionary Girl Utena, which was important because Nanami is my favorite character from that anime by a wide margin. Finally, it gave us a fresh face to add to sex scenes in chapter 5, which felt appropriate given that chapter 4 hadn’t seen any new additions to the cast. Although the cast was PROBABLY large enough that we could have managed without her, Sasha wound up bringing out new facets of Jackie, Olive, and Rose during their respective scenes together, so I consider her to be a very successful late addition indeed.

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 6: The Rest Of The Cast” →

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PICTURED: Splash art from Opportunity of Juniper encouraging Jacqueline during a workout.

Juniper

My intention when setting out to produce Opportunity was for Jacqueline to be supported by a pair of her best friends: Olive and Juniper. In the finest traditions of fictional trios, if Jacqueline was our Fairly Average One and Olive was The One Who Is Short And Round, it naturally followed that Juniper would need to be The One Who Is Tall And Thin. I had originally planned for Olive and Juniper to have roughly equal prominence in the story, but things didn’t really work out that way – Olive wound up enjoying much, MUCH greater prominence than originally envisioned, while I think Juniper unfortunately fades into the background somewhat. In some ways, I think this perhaps mirrors the three women’s friendship. Yes, it’s true that Jacqueline, Olive, and Juniper are a group of three best friends, but I think they all privately understand that Jacqueline and Olive are the capital-B capital-F Best Friends in the equation.

(Reminder: significant plot spoilers to follow below the cut!)

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 5: Juniper, Rose, and Kate” →

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PICTURED: Earliest piece of Roman’s concept art, showcasing what would become his default look for the first three chapters, plus some sample facial expressions.

Roman

Being far and away the most visible of the story’s two straight male characters, and the only one who gets any presence in sex scenes (sorry, Clayton), Roman bears a lot of responsibility across his broad shoulders.

A lot of things about Roman as a character were approached from the angle of specifically considering a type of frustrated-straight-Millennial-woman wish fulfillment. Roman is older than Jacqueline (44 to her 32), old enough to convey a sense of maturity and wisdom, but not so old as to put him far beyond the age range that women identifying with Jacqueline might consider dating (and not so old as to make his sexual stamina feel unbelievable). He’s wealthy, but not to an absurd, unimaginable degree, and his wealth came to him at least partially via his own ability (all of which soothes the conscience of anyone dating him). He’s gentle, kind, and respectful of Jacqueline’s boundaries – but can be assertive when it’s hot for him to be so. Despite his fabulous wealth, Roman isn’t a sleazy playboy or weird grindset hustler or an anti-aging-mumbo-jumbo freak – he’s sort of a dorky homebody whose primary hobby is fixing up old transistor radios (while also being tall and muscular with a great head of hair). A lot of what makes Roman Roman has been fine-tuned to make him into the sort of sugar daddy where someone could look at him and say “well… if it were HIM, I suppose I wouldn’t mind…”

(Reminder: significant plot spoilers to follow below the cut!)

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 4: Roman, Olive, and Olive’s Family” →

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PICTURED: Pieces of concept art for Opportunity’s main character Jacqueline, showcasing some facial expressions and a few early takes on her baker’s uniform.

Jacqueline (Jackie For Short)

Jacqueline is a character borne from a confluence of many intersecting anxieties I was experiencing when first setting out to work on Opportunity: anxiety about the ever-increasing cost of living, anxiety about rising Puritan fascism, anxiety about social isolation, anxiety about aging, anxiety about my own sexual desirability, and anxiety about how uncertain and unfriendly the future looked amid an ongoing pandemic. I suppose it follows that she wound up being a pretty anxious person herself.

A lot of what I think people find true or relatable about Jackie was really just me trying my best to represent the real-world struggles of my friends who were mothers. Going back to the previous entry in this series, the real-world setting again does a lot of the conceptual heavy lifting here: everyone knows that, in our society, mothers have it rough. A mother is an amalgam of several highly-skilled jobs, none of them paid. A mother is a teacher and a counsellor, a mother is a cook and a maid, a mother is an accountant and an event planner. And that’s all before getting into the increased challenge of being a single parent with a full-time job to boot! Put all of that together and you’ve got a character who is tired, stressed, tired, experiencing guilt from a half-dozen different directions at any given time, tired, more than a little sexually-frustrated, and unimaginably tired. A character, in other words, who is desperate to make a change.

(I’ll just put a reminder here before the break: this series contains spoilers about the plot of Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story! You’ve been warned!)

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 3: Jacqueline & Her Family” →

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PICTURED: An piece of splash art from Opportunity’s first chapter.

THE INITIAL CONCEPT

There are two things you should know before I explain where the idea for Opportunity came from. The first of them is this: at the start of 2020, Pacha and I were still working on our previous project – an erotic sci-fi vehicle about a school for mech pilots called As Above/So Below. As fond as we were of the concept and the characters, we’d also been grinding away at it for over three years without much more than a demo to show for it and we were both getting pretty burnt-out. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit at the start of 2020, that was pretty much the final nail in the coffin, as it left me thoroughly brainbroken for several months and the thought of continuing to struggle with AA/SB while I was trying to keep it together in the middle of a global pandemic was unthinkable.

The second thing you should know is that for several years up to this point, I had been nursing an absolutely TERMINAL crush on a good friend. She was, unfortunately for me, happily married to a frankly excellent dude, and also had two small children.

The more observant among you may start to see where this is heading.

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective Part 2: Concept & Themes” →

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