Category: Game Development

PICTURED: Opportunity’s main menu screen.

INTRODUCTION

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to write, at length, about the experience of making some form of creative project. This stems from a life misspent poring time and time again over such indispensable self-commentary works as The Art of Discworld, Steven Universe: Art and Origins, and, most treasured among them all, The Calvin & Hobbes 10th Anniversary Book. There’s something so seductive to me about holding forth on all the little decisions you made, the things that influenced you, the experiences that shaped your creation… while I wouldn’t necessarily say that this desire is my sole or even primary creative driving force, I also can’t deny that it’s a significant contributor.

The only inconvenient thing is that in order to indulge this long-held desire to write a bunch of preening autobiographical fluff where I talk about how clever and creative I am, I first had to actually MAKE something that I’m proud of and that could bear this kind of extended scrutiny. So I did! It’s called Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story!

Here’s some quick at-a-glance facts about Opportunity:

  • Opportunity is a pornographic kinetic novel about sex work, romance, parenting, and Millennial ennui. It released on Steam and Itch in February of 2023.
  • I did all of the writing, programming, and assorted managerial tasks, while all character sprites and sex scene artwork was created by the pseudonymous artist Pacha.
  • The first chapter of Opportunity released on Itch in late February of 2021. It was about 20,000 words, had only two sex scenes, and took about an hour to play if you read slow.
  • After catching the eye of boutique pornographic games publisher TinyHat, we released chapters 1-3 on Steam Early Access in March of 2022, with chapter 4 coming in August of that year.
  • The full, final, 5-chapter version of Opportunity is over 140,000 words long, takes 6-10 hours to read end-to-end, and features nearly 400 sex scene CGs.
  • Opportunity is the second project Pacha and I worked on together, the first being the as-yet-incomplete mecha-themed visual novel As Above/So Below. It will soon be followed by our third large-scale project, the mind-control-breaking isekai sandbox visual novel Monstrous Liberation.

This will be a series of essays exploring the themes, influences, characters, and philosophies contained within Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story. I hope that it proves interesting not only to fans of the game, but also to people who might want to know about my creative process and personal motivations for making Opportunity! (As this series will inevitably discuss plot spoilers, each one will consist of a short spoiler-free introduction followed by a read-more divider.)

To begin with, let’s take a look at some of the other creative works that shaped my approach to developing Opportunity.

Continue reading “Opportunity Retrospective: Part 1 (Intro & Inspirations)” →

1
PICTURED: A screenshot from Ghost Hug Games’ Hardcoded.

Welcome to Cohost Re-Runs! The following is a lightly-edited & expanded version of an essay that first appeared on my personal Cohost page in March of 2023. One thing that’s important to remember: I’m still correct about this.

The first thing we need to do is lay down some definitions. When talking about “porn games”, I’m talking about interactive media wherein the primary goal is provoking a strong sexual response in the player. A porn game is not merely a game that features sexually-provocative imagery – Bayonetta, for example, features a lot of T&A along with a lot of playful references to BDSM, but it’d take a pretty advanced case of puritanical brainrot to argue earnestly that it’s a porn game – it’s a high-energy 3rd-person combo-based brawler with an aesthetic that includes a lot of sexualized imagery. A more digestible way of making the distinction might be to say that porn games expect you to masturbate while playing them. It’s important that we’re on the same page with this definition of porn games, because if we aren’t then nothing I say from here on out is going to hold water.

Addendum from Future Bigg: Following conversations I had after the initial version of this essay was published, I’d like to add that the utility of the above definition, which separates “porn games” from “games with porn in them”, is that of establishing design goals. In a porn game as defined in the above paragraph, the desired outcome (and, in a sense, the ludic “win state”) is to inspire sexual arousal in the player, and as such all design decisions need to be evaluated on the basis of how well they facilitate that outcome. In a game that has porn in it, where the intended outcome might be some combination of narrative fulfillment, a sense of discovery, or mechanical mastery, design decisions can be evaluated on how well they support THOSE outcomes. In the abstract I think that there’s TREMENDOUS value in having mechanically-rich games that feature hardcore pornography as part of their aesthetic makeup, as the normalizing influence of a very fun, very popular game featuring pornography like it’s not a big deal cannot be overstated. In practice, however, I think we’ve honestly yet to see very many games with porn in them that could honestly be said to be as mechanically-satisfying as their non-pornographic analogues.

Continue reading “It’s Time To Accept There Isn’t A Better Porn Game Format Than The Visual Novel” →

2

In spring of 2022, my friend Aidan approached me and asked if I’d like to become a beta user for a social media website she’d been working on called Cohost. I had been a regular Twitter user since 2009, but hadn’t enjoyed much of a public web presence for years, preferring the relative safety of my locked account and a few small Discord servers, so I was a bit leery. However, Cohost had a pretty attractive value proposition: no ads (ever), a chronological timeline, no visible counts for likes or shares, no notifications except for comments on your posts, a robust tagging system, and an even more robust system for silencing, muting, and blocking tags and users. And to top things off, porn of all stripes was welcome – a feature fast becoming a rarity among social networks.

It wasn’t long before I was fully and irreversibly hooked. Cohost proved to be the perfect home for my personal brand of longwinded self-important essay-writing – the Markdown-based post composer was easy enough to use, there was an active community of developers making fun tools and plugins to enhance the experience, and the site attracted the sort of person who actually ENJOYS seeking out and reading passionate longform writing about someone’s hyperfixation. And I got to write about PORN – something I’ve been fond of thinking about more or less my entire life – as much as I wanted! And people LIKED it!

I wrote goofy little spec scripts for theoretical Daz3D porn games. I wrote irritated screeds about the challenges of porn game development. I wrote gushingly about porn games that have inspired me throughout my career. I transcribed my extremely correct opinion that the only good genre of porn game is the visual novel. I wrote about Opportunity‘s complicated relationship with the strictures of coziness as a porn game. I maintained an alphabetized list of porn creators that had over 600 accounts listed, complete with digestible descriptions of their content. And I didn’t JUST write about porn – I wrote longform game reviews, I wrote cultural commentary, I wrote educational posts about pain science and massage, I wrote extremely long analyses of Forgotten Realms novels, and I even wrote a series of posts memorializing Flash-based comic creation engine BitStrips, which I miss keenly to this day. While I had always thought of myself as a writer (when I joined the site I was in the middle of writing a visual novel that would go on to be over 140,000 words by the time it was finished, after all), on Cohost I discovered a love for blogging I hadn’t realized I possessed.

And, as shown in the above image, Cohost was also the home of BP Games’s first-ever development and promotional blog. Although BP Games had existed as a concept since 2017 and as a company since 2021, Cohost was the first place where it felt like insight into what BP Games produced would be appreciated and celebrated. Cohost was the platform that made me suspect that there might be enough other people out there with interesting thoughts about porn games to populate some kind of zine – a project that wound up becoming the Adult Analysis Anthology. Cohost put me in contact with multiple creative collaborators, and proved to be an extremely consistent source of both emotional and financial support. Cohost is indelibly intertwined with the story of BP Games, and I had hoped that both myself and BP Games would have a permanent home there. Sadly, this was not to be.

Three days ago from the time of writing this, Cohost staff announced that the site will be ceasing operations – as of October 1st the site will go read-only, and on January 1st 2025 the servers will shut down. Flatly put, this news left me devastated. The past several days have been spent in a sort of depressive frenzy as I scramble to cobble together some kind of ramshackle solution that will allow me to preserve as much of the network and audience that I so carefully cultivated over the 2.5 years I was active on Cohost. Broadly speaking, it is a good thing that this website and attendant blog now exist – Monstrous Liberation will launch in a few short months (God willing, knock on wood, etc) and it was always my intention to put together a semi-professional website that could include a landing page, roadmap, and development diary for the game. However, this was a process I had anticipated luxuriating in; taking my sweet time comparing hosts and website builders, learning the tools, tweaking the design, and just generally having fun learning a new skill and having a shiny new website at the end of it. Instead, I have had to rush through the process as best I can so that I can get the site operational before Cohost goes read-only and my remaining window of time to communicate with fans of BP Games on there closes. Circumstances are less than ideal.

As mentioned, the website and blog are just one part of a multi-pronged approach to preserving as much of BP Games’s Cohost audience as possible. In addition to pushing the monthly BP Games newsletter, I will also be more regularly using my public-facing dev Twitter account and making accounts on both Tumblr and Bluesky (the degree to which I’ll make use of each of these platforms remains to be seen, but what’s certain is that there are precious few social media networks that allow even ASSOCIATION with pornography, and a longform blog is poorly-suited to shitposting and large-scale user acquisition). I’ve also spun up a Discord server, but I’m being careful to not treat that as a BP-Games-centric space – it’s more focused on preserving Cohost’s culture of discussion, curiosity, and discovery around porn (porn games in particular).

Here is the plan for this blog going forward:

  • Newsletter development updates will be crossposted here for those who don’t want to receive e-mails
  • I will be intermittently posting things that previously appeared on my personal Cohost account under the “Cohost Reruns” category, lightly adapting them as appropriate
  • I will also be working to re-publish all of the publicly-posted Adult Analysis Anthology essays that were previously published on the BP Games Cohost account
  • As appropriate, this blog will feature announcements about major project launches and sales (though not EVERY sale will be promoted here)
  • Once things have stabilized somewhat, I will start using this blog to write and publish new essays and other longform writing on subjects like porn, game development, media criticism, and dumbshit goofing
  • Lastly and most importantly: I want to maintain a robust blogroll/webring populated at first by people I want to keep in touch with from Cohost, and hopefully adding to that as time goes on. My vision for this is to regularly promote writing, art, and other projects by the people and teams on this blogroll, likely in the form of some kind of regular greatest-hits post.

Thanks for reading. Let’s keep going.

– Bigg

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