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.

Sasha was also the third trans character to be added to Opportunity‘s cast, after Shruthi and Rose, although I genuinely don’t know how many people noticed this. In my mind, Sasha medically transitioned basically as early as possible, receiving a full vaginoplasty, and has been dilating regularly for several years. Although I made her trans status more-or-less explicit in her pre-and-post sex scene conversations with Jackie and Rose at the orgy, we also did our best to signal it more obliquely by giving her a pastel blue-and-pink color scheme and a lot of “Zoomer gender goblin” tells. In a way, Sasha is simultaneously overstated and understated for a trans character in a porn game – although Sasha does everything but turn to face the player and say “Just so you know, I used to be a boy”, it’s also very rare in porn games to have trans characters (especially trans characters who take part in sex scenes) whose transness isn’t explicitly front-and-centered for the purposes of either Representation or (much more frequently) Fetishization. Note that I’m not saying that having a trans woman character who checks all the boxes of traditional cisgendered femininity and desirability is overwhelmingly RADICAL, mind you – just that there tends to be a very narrow range of alternative gender expression that tends to appear in porn, if it appears at all.

In terms of visual influences, we primarily drew inspiration from pre-porn-career Belle Delphine. Delphine has a very potent mixture of classic girl-next-door cuteness with JUST enough alt/scene-girl aesthetic mixed in for flavor. I like to imagine that Sasha might have been a fan of hers and used her as a reference point when assembling her own look post-transition.

It’s pretty funny that we see Sasha exclusively hooking up with older women in Opportunity because she’s not ACTUALLY a MILF hunter. She certainly LIKES older women, but that’s just because older women are insanely hot as a general rule. Sasha and I share the opinion that if a woman in her mid-30s or older wants to use you sexually, you count your lucky stars and let it happen. However, in terms of specifics she’s really into being roughly used, almost to the point of having a depersonalization/doll kink. She also commissions a fuckload of monsterfucking art, although this never made it onscreen. Don’t worry, though – everyone will get a LOT better-acquainted with Sasha’s personal sexual proclivities in Monstrous Liberation.

Yasmin

Because Opportunity is a story about adults going on dates and living well, it made sense to give Glacier Rest a shockingly-modern cocktail bar as a destination for said dates. It then naturally followed that said cocktail bar (which received the placeholder name of “The Placeholder” which was then made official when I realized that was honestly a pretty good name for a bar) needed a Hot Bartender – Hot Bartenders being one of this Earth’s most beautiful occurrences. A Hot Bartender flirting with you can be a vital bulwark for one’s self-esteem, particularly in such emotionally-fraught contexts as the dreaded First Date. I made the decision to make this particular Hot Bartender a mature butch lesbian because I wanted to avoid the impression that Jacqueline was going to be “competed” over by Roman and a male bartender, and because I wanted to do something a little more conceptually-interesting than just A Guy. Thus: Yasmin.

I recall that I had planned out a decent amount of backstory for Yasmin that sadly never made its way into the finished product. In addition to being the owner-operator of The Placeholder, she was also supposed to be supporting a much-younger sister while said sister went to school. Ultimately there just wasn’t any room in the story for Yasmin to be fleshed out beyond Hot Bartender, however – we only ever got to spend time with her in the context of her workplace, after all. Alas, this is the way of the world – oftentimes a Hot Bartender will only ever be a Hot Bartender.

If there’s one reason I regret Yasmin not being a more prominent member of the cast it’s because butches look fucking phenomenal in menswear. Don’t get me wrong, Roman fills out his wardrobe nicely, but it would have been nice for someone with a little bit of swagger to balance his fairly conservative style. Yasmin’s real-world visual inspiration came most prominently from Grey’s Anatomy mainstay Sara Ramirez, with a dash of Super Junior’s Shin Dong Hee.

Shruthi

Any story about a single mother gaining some measure of liberation from her responsibilities is going to eventually necessitate the introduction of some kind of babysitter, nanny, or, depending on the time period you’re operating in, a governess. It’s a small but crucial role, and I’m pretty happy with how Shruthi fills it. They don’t have a specific real-world counterpart other than the several unflappable, hard-working, no-nonsense Desi women I happened to share class space with in my post-secondary scholastic career. Visually, I wanted Shruthi to project a very deliberate kind of all-business-femme kind of vibe, a desire that was borne from exasperation over non-binary characters in fiction tending to be represented with a kind of haphazard shapelessness that I’ve personally always found to be extremely alien to the actual non-binary people in my life.

Shruthi’s approach to relating to small children is very much my own: take everything they’re saying completely seriously and then learn to work within their personal worldview. This is not a particularly effective tactic if you need to actually be a parent to small children since it really hamstrings your ability to be any kind of disciplinarian, but in my experience it’s a sure-fire way of getting kids to think you’re cool. It’s also more than a little inspired by one of my favorite story arcs from Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes, in which Calvin’s long-suffering college-student babysitter Rosalyn manages to wrangle the pathologically-obnoxious six-year-old more successfully than she’s ever managed before by engaging earnestly with his favorite game: the purely-improvisational “Calvinball”.

Olive’s wet and wild fuck-bender in chapter 3 was a really smart idea, if I may toot my own tooter for a second. In addition to providing a way to subtly escalate Jacqueline and Olive’s relationship without Olive needing to be directly present, it also gave us the opportunity to show Yasmin and Shruthi a little love at the same time. Without Olive we likely would never have gotten to see either of them naked, so bless her for that. I had considered a sex scene between Jackie and Shruthi at one point, but discarded it. For one thing, it’d be a little too Don Draper of Jacqueline to fuck her babysitter – there’s a very specific kind of boundary being crossed in that case, and I was pretty sure that Jackie would find crossing that boundary unthinkable. Plus, I think it turned out to be way more fun for her to guiltily crank off to the video Olive sent her and then vowing to take that secret to her grave.

Alejandro

As a character, I based Alejandro (proprietor of the bakery-cafe “Petty Indulgences”) very heavily on a man named Craig, who was the best boss I’ve ever had in my life. I spent one very happy summer break working at Craig’s used bookstore alongside him and his lovingly-overfed tortoiseshell shop cat. I loved that fucking cat, but Craig was pretty cool too. Craig had lived a very eventful life, holding such jobs as lumberjack and professional surfer, before taking over the bookstore from his mother and turning it into a local institution. Craig had a booming gravel pit of a voice, a wicked sense of humor, an unerring sense for which books to stock to satisfy the store’s clientele, and, crucially, a bottomless well of patience and respect for me, a nineteen-year-old fuckass unsure of what he wanted out of life. Alejandro is very much of the same mould – he’s a small business owner who takes immense pride not only in his work, but also in treating people well. He pays as much as he’s able (and is a little embarrassed because he knows it’s not enough) and won’t ride your ass if you need to bug out early to pick up your kids. Alejandro understands that he’s got less life ahead of him than behind him, and wants to live his remaining years well.

Alejandro is also heavily inspired by Sojiro Sakura, who, in addition to also being a good-natured and locally-respected small business owner, is The Dude Of All Time and my favorite character from Persona 5. Sojiro is great; he’s an inveterate pussyhound, he knows how to dress, he’s obsessed with coffee, and he fucking hates cops. He’s also a prickly, craggy old cuss who slowly reveals himself to be possessed of shocking generosity and gentleness. Alejandro is sort of my little tribute to Sojiro, although I did take SOME care to differentiate the two. Where Sojiro contents himself with coffee and curry, Alejandro is a much more well-rounded cook (though he’s most comfortable with the French cuisine standards and considers himself Julia Child’s most ardent admirer). Sojiro is also something of a lonesome widower type, so I knew I would need to furnish Alejandro with a romance of his very own at some point. Which brings us, at last, to…

Dominic

Sometimes it’s funny, the paths one’s mind gets sent down. Sometime in the early 2020s I was idly browsing Instagram and was randomly shown a post from male model/influencer Raven Tacwigan. I was quite taken with his look and overall vibe, which was a little bit soft, a little bit self-conscious, but very charming and approachable. I remember thinking while looking through his profile “this guy is awesome. There should be a game about this guy.” To my knowledge there’s yet to be a game made ABOUT him, but some time later when I was looking for someone to base Alejandro’s boyfriend on, Tacwigan seemed like a natural fit.

Much like Shruthi, Dominic’s is a minor role, but it’s an important one for making the world feel like it’s moving on its own even when Jacqueline isn’t present. Stories where it seems like nothing ever happens without the main character’s direct involvement have always irked me, so I went out of my way to make it clear that every member of the cast has a life outside Jackie. It was also important to me that Alejandro get a cute young boyfriend who delights in flustering him in front of customers.

Dominic’s single appearance is too brief to really reveal any details about his life, so allow me to indulge in a bit of post-facto worldbuilding as we wrap up our in-depth examination of the cast. He’s Filipino, and speaks English, Tagalog, and Spanish (though that last one isn’t really at conversational levels yet – “Spanish lessons” were likely another one of the tricks he played to get closer to Alejandro). As mentioned in the game, he’s a recent graduate of the culinary school at Glacier Rest’s technical college (the same one Jacqueline went to, and the same one that Shruthi is currently attending). He’s the middle sibling of five brothers, and is constantly bringing his younger brothers (both of whom are in high school) treats from the bakery. He’d like to travel extensively, and has not-so-subtly implied that he’d like to do so alongside the worldly Alejandro. Time will tell if Alejandro can resist the temptation to take a sabbatical from the bakery to tour the globe with his boyfriend, but his odds aren’t looking very good.

That brings us to the end of our in-depth examination of Opportunity‘s cast! Why did I put so many characters in this thing, that took FOREVER. The next part of the retrospective will look at the specific development process of a typical chapter of Opportunity, from concept to release (and beyond). Leave a comment if you have specific question about Opportunity or our approach to adult game development, and I’ll try to work it in! Thank you for reading! Please consider supporting my work by purchasing the game on Steam, Itch, or GOG! See you next time!

NEXT ESSAY IN THIS SERIES: Opportunity Retrospective Part 7: The Development Process

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