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.

The one thing I do like about Opportunity‘s ending was the decision to set it on the deck of the ferry that crosses the Strait of Georgia, bringing passengers between Vancouver Island and the mainland. I think it’s a good representation of one journey ending and another beginning. Having Jackie simple stand there and think about how happy she is and how much better things have gotten since she started doing sex work might not have been the most elegant way to end things, but at least I got that much right.

Another of the ending’s saving graces is the slideshow of splash images that follow Jacqueline’s monologue on the deck of the ferry. This is all thanks to Pacha – I came to her, hat in hand, after all of the game’s planned art assets were locked and loaded, just a couple of months before we were going to have our final-final launch, and said something along the lines of “hey, feel free to say no, but I think we need a few more splash panels of everyone living life after the story ends” and then gave her a list of ten situations. Pacha, bless her, managed to bang out seven of them before we absolutely had to commit our final build for launch. Although I initially only saw these panels being a little bit of much-needed denouement for an ending I KNEW would feel rushed, they’ve actually proven to be rather more invaluable than that. This slideshow contains the only two splash images of Jacqueline interacting with her children, for instance – all of the other splashes are porn, or porn-adjacent, and as such the kids can’t be anywhere NEAR that stuff. They also do a much better job, for my money, of showcasing the overall vibe of Opportunity for a curious onlooker than most of the pornographic splashes do. When I think about Opportunity, I think about the image of Kate and Jackie yukking it up at The Placeholder while Yasmin looks on, or about Jackie walking in on Aster and Shruthi wearing matching kitty-cat makeup. I should also mention that Pacha smashed all of these out with VERY little direction from me. She’s so fucking good at art.

On Nothing Really Ending

I’ve developed a relationship to my creative work that probably scans as unhealthy at first blush, but is actually the result of me weaponizing my psychoses against myself in order to make things happen. See, I’ve learned that the best way to get myself to Produce is to have multiple projects on the go at any given time. If I’m ever not working I feel really bad about myself, but I ALSO love to procrastinate from working on projects when I’m feeling stuck, so I’ll instead pick one of my other on-the-go projects to work on instead so that I can silence the part of me that starts screaming if I’m not working on anything. However, this activates the part of me that hates leaving things unfinished, making me progressively more and more miserable until I finally crack and switch gears to work on whatever’s been languishing the longest. By way of example: the reason that I’m finally working on the conclusion to this retrospective series is because I’ve spent the past two weeks finishing the most recent issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, during which time the shame of the retrospective being incomplete was building until I was ready to burst. Now that I’m finally writing this essay, I can feel the shame at not working on the script for the next update to Monstrous Liberation roiling around the pit of my stomach, ensuring that I’ll be able to tackle that next. And when I get around to working on that, I’ll be feeling guilty that I’m not working on, oh, I don’t know, the asset list for the next update, or my next original essay, or the draft for the light novel I’ve been tinkering with – the point is that whatever it is, it’s going to eat away at me from the inside out until I do it. And thus, art happens.

As you get older, you get more and more of a sense of how limited your time to do the things you want to do might be. Early in this series I mentioned that I was practising as a massage therapist when I started my adult game development sideline. In the years that followed, I managed to develop a herniated disc in my spine that ultimately washed me out of massage therapy as a profession due to the frequently-disabling pain that the hours of physically-demanding work would leave me in. I used to enjoy drinking on a regular basis, but worsening depression/anxiety combined with GERD have made alcohol a twice-a-year indulgence, if that. Hell, I used to spend hours at a stretch sitting at my computer, browsing the web, playing games, bullshitting with friends, etc. I still do those things, but now my butt HURTS. My butt is hurting right now as I type this! What the fuck! All of this is to say that I feel a mounting, very palpable sense of pressure to do as much as I can while I’m able (let’s not even get into the increasingly-fraught legality of pornography in the current era, please).

I’m very glad to be finishing this retrospective series. As I mentioned back in the first essay, writing something like this has been something I’ve wanted to do for basically as long as I’ve had any kind of creative aspirations whatsoever. I’ve received some very nice compliments about these essays over the months, and I’d like to think that it’s positive for people to have a document that gets at all the work, care, and thought that goes into making even a pretty small-scale adult game. It a lot of fun, getting to talk at length about all the stuff that mostly just lives in your head when you’re making a game and that nobody would ever necessarily even know to ask about (I’ll mention that if anyone ever DOES want to ask about any of this stuff on their podcast or something: I have a deep, resonant voice and both my schedule & my Bluesky DMs are wide open). I’m also glad to be finishing this series because my GOD but it’s a relief to be able to put a project to bed and move on to the next thing.

Maybe it feels a little silly to you, me having written as much as I have about a little porn game like Opportunity. After all, it’s hardly been a runaway financial success – I’d estimate that across all platforms it’s received around 10,000 purchases in the three years since we first launched it in early-access. After accounting for platform fees, payment processor fees, taxes, and our publisher’s cut, that translates to, generously, about $50k USD hitting the BP Games bank account in those three years. This is not a lot of money, even for a studio of just two people whose expenses are extremely modest. There isn’t any reliable way for me to know how many people have actually played the game – optimistically, only about 50% of people who purchase a game actually play it these days, but with porn games there’s the added wild card of an unknowable number of people downloading it off scraper sites and archivers like F95. I’ve yet to see any naturally-occurring fanart of any characters from the game, or any kind of fanwork at all for that matter (if you’ve produced or know of any, please let me know! That would genuinely make my day). It would be pretty tough for me to argue that the game has attained anything even approaching “cult hit” status with a straight face.  It would be laughable to claim that anyone, besides me and perhaps a handful of others, really cares that much.

But then, that’s the Tale As Old As Time of making any kind of independent art, isn’t it? You’ve GOT to be the person who cares the most about whatever it is you’re making. That’s why you’re MAKING it. That’s why you’re making it, in spite of how hard it is, how long it takes, and how many obstacles are in the way. The vision of the thing has to haunt you for weeks, months, years, visible to you and you alone, before anything that even RESEMBLES it becomes perceptible to other people. You have to care, otherwise you wouldn’t be making it. I spent three years caring more about making Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story than almost anything else, and I wanted to create a monument to that care before years of caring about Monstrous Liberation (and then, about whatever comes after Monstrous Liberation) chase all the details from my mind.

That brings us, at long last, to the very end of this retrospective series. I’d like to take a moment to thank Pacha for being the best creative partner anyone could ever ask for – her work is consistently tremendous and continues to get better year after year. I sincerely hope we’re still making games together a decade from now. I’d also like to thank Sumari for being the best Best Friend in the entire world, keeping me far saner and happier than I would be otherwise, and providing invaluable feedback whenever I ask for it (which probably isn’t frequently enough). Thank you also to (in no particular order): Arden, Julian, Aidan, Diesel, Derek, Flynn, Spire, Lu, Hands, and Darcy for their support and contributions to this project over the years. I know I used the word “independent” a lot in this retrospective, but the truth is that no game is ever made with the work of JUST one person. Finally, thank YOU, the reader, for (presumably) enjoying this series! I hope you’ll stick around to see what comes next!

A post-facto programming note: in the hopefully-not-too-distant future I intend to collect this series of essays as a downloadable PDF that will be available for purchase either on its own or in a bundle with Opportunity, so look out for that! For the last time: please consider supporting my work by purchasing Opportunity on Steam, Itch, or GOG! If you haven’t already, please also consider picking up Monstrous Liberation, currently available in early access on Steam and Itch! By the way, we recently launched pages on both Patreon and SubscribeStar – if you appreciate the work we do and would like to support it on an ongoing basis, why not toss us a few bucks there? See you in the next post!

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