Author: Bigg

PICTURED: Some saucy seasonal art of Jacqueline, circa 2021.

Happy December, everyone! Last month of the year, huh? Hope it’s a good one! Let’s get to the update.

Monstrous Liberation Work

Some fucking excellent news right from the jump: Monstrous Liberation has passed Steam’s build review process and thus has an official launch date! That’s right, you will be able to purchase and play the early-access version of Monstrous Liberation on Steam and Itch on FEBRUARY 24TH, 2025! If you haven’t already, now would be an EXCELLENT time to wishlist the game on Steam!

My work for this month is pure polish for the launch version, which I anticipate being fully launch-ready by the end of December. Arden got their edit pass feedback back to me a couple of days ago, and I have begun the process of adding in the mountain of em dashes they demand (along with various minor rewrites, grammar fixes, and the like). I’ll also be making other minor fixes here and there (the city map buttons, for example, have literally never worked the way I want them to and it’s time to finally address that). After all the polish has been completed, I’ll take a little break and then get to planning the content for the first update!

On Pacha’s end, she was unfortunately working through some more health stuff, but has been working hard to finish up all the remaining art (which, at this point, only consists of a few fixes to some sprite art and a handful of splash panels) by the end of the year.

Continue reading “December 2024 Update: Finally, Some Good Fucking News” →

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This is third of ten essays contained within the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but if you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Lynn “wintermute” Robinson

I enjoy playing Tales of Androgyny. It is a well illustrated porn game with Visual-Novel-style dialogue and a surprisingly deep combat system that leads into evocative sex scenes. The majority of fuckable NPCs within the game are large, voluptuous women sporting equally large penises. The outcomes of the dialogue and combat systems determine whether they end up fucking your player character (“PC”) or being fucked by them, as well as who is “leading the action”. As a trans woman who is sexually interested in other women, these characters are unsurprisingly appealing to me. I enjoy the sex scenes, although what keeps me coming back to the game as it continues development are the engaging systems and the fantasy of inhabiting the world. The game allows some level of character customization, and so I tend to play Tales of Androgyny the same way I do Corruption of Champions (“CoC”), or games like Fallout or Skyrim: I make my character into a facsimile of myself, and role-play as if I were inhabiting that world.Though not particularly fine-grained, the character customization does facilitate this style of play through renaming the PC, picking their facial characteristics, skin tone, hair color, and the sizes of body parts. You cannot pick your gender, notably, nor can you pick your genitals like you can in CoC. Though I am unbothered by the mandatory penis and solitary hole, the lack of gender selection is where I begin to experience friction in my desired role-play.

Continue reading “Femboys, Futanari, And Finding Myself In The Space Between Their Bodies” →

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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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This is second of ten essays contained within the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but if you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: raginghadron

Time and time again while browsing adult games, I see store page after store page with bad marketing copy; bad enough that it actually obstructs the process of deciding whether or not to buy or try a game. This sucks from the perspective of a consumer, and it’s also gotta suck from the perspective of a developer.

It doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve seen indie developers talk about struggling with marketing, and I can totally understand how it can seem difficult from the outside, but it isn’t something that’s out of reach, even for an indie developer with no budget.

I used to work as an editor for marketing copy; I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a marketing expert, but pointing out flaws in marketing copy (and suggesting ways to fix them) was part of my job.

In this article, I want to use that experience to help you market your adult game. This isn’t about advertising or social media campaigns, but about the fundamental way you describe your game to potential buyers. Specifically, I’m going to focus on what goes on a game’s store page, but this information should generalize well to any other forms of marketing you choose to do.

Continue reading “Don’t Play Coy: Marketing Advice For Adult Game Devs” →

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This is first of ten essays contained within the second issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but if you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Davis G. See

The Dark Ages Of Western Gay Visual Novels

When I backed Coming Out on Top on Kickstarter at the tail end of 2012, I had only played one other gay adult visual novel. That game was Enzai, which, in 2006, was the first gay adult VN to receive an official English release, with only a very small number of others having even had English fan translations. I had no idea what I was getting into with Enzai, only that it was a video game featuring men having sex with each other. When I played it, I discovered that it was actually about a skinny young man being imprisoned and repeatedly, violently raped. This was not what I wanted.

In the time between the release of Enzai in 2006 and Coming Out on Top’s release in 2014, a handful of other gay adult VNs saw official or unofficial English releases. Some were fangames for properties like Death Note or Hetalia; some were small, amateur projects with low production values; and at least one was about old, heavyset men. But most were similar to Enzai, i.e. games about yaoi twinks being sexually assaulted. I’m sure some people felt well catered to during this time, but for those of us who could not understand Japanese1 or get off to depictions of rape, the pickings were slim.

I explain all this to stress that Obscura, the developer of Coming Out on Top, was doing something unique. At least as far as the English-speaking world was concerned, there was nothing else like Coming Out on Top.

Continue reading “Coming Out On Top: A Ten-Year Retrospective” →

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)” →

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This is ninth of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but if you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: MorganH

It is, at this point, a cliche to introduce any topic on videogames by describing their interactivity as a unique element of the medium. Fortunately, it is not yet a cliche to describe how it is this precise quality that transforms players from fucking themselves to fucking their games.

Adult videogames and pornographic community mods have a long and under-examined history in games, and while there is little criticism on the subject, there is even less that uses adult games to investigate the complicated interface between players and games. Players have had sexual interactions with their videogames long before haptic vibrations turned controllers into makeshift sex toys, but recently, the increasing popularity of porn games and the growing presence of digital connectivity between videogames and electronic toys make this relationship even more intimate and intertwined. Examining how adult games mechanize players’ own bodies reveals a particularly potent image of how videogame play is mediated through corporeal presence.

Continue reading “Fuck this Game: Intercorporeality, Erotic Cybernetics, and Becoming the Input” →

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This is eighth of nine essays contained within the first issue of the Adult Analysis Anthology, an experimental collection of longform writing that seeks to expand the breadth of critical discourse around adult games and adult game culture. I will be re-publishing the web versions of all essays from the first two issues of the anthology to this blog over the course of the next few months, but if you’d like to support the creation of more high-quality writing about adult games the full anthology is available for purchase on Itch! Anthology logo by Pillow!

Written By: Mr. Hands

I had heard many good things about The Imperial Gatekeeper, a dark adult game about a fantasy country torn apart by war. You play an army bureaucrat tasked with checking people’s documentation before they’re allowed entry. But while it starts off easy, the list of rules keeps increasing in complexity as the story progresses. It sounded like the game could make for an interesting experience, although with some very dark undertones. What kind of harassment are the people at your desk willing to let you get away with if they are desperate for a stamp of approval on their paperwork? Unfortunately, I never saw these questions answered during my first playthrough. I was apparently playing the world’s most boring paperwork simulator, stamping people’s documents for no reward. That’s because the version I had bought on Steam was missing something important: a patch to add in the adult content that had been removed by the publisher.

But where did the frustrating practice of hiding adult content behind patches come from? And can we do anything about it?

Continue reading “Patching In Holes And Hogs In Adult Games” →

PICTURED: Nadia under duress. Also a tidy encapsulation of how November’s been so far.

Happy(?) November, everyone! Happy, of course, unless you happen to have many, many reasons to be anxious about what the future could hold for you and the people you love! Let’s get to the update.

Monstrous Liberation Work

Let’s start with some good news: as expected, aside from a small amount of optional side content that’s waiting on art, the launch version of Monstrous Liberation is fully-playable from end to end. All of the critical path story stuff has been implemented and all systems are working exactly as intended. All that remains to do on the game itself before launch is implementing that last bit of side content along with a bit of tweaking and polish. It’s been a huge amount of work to get it to this point, but I’m extremely proud of the work done by myself, Pacha, and Julian (Arden’s bit is coming up soon, now that they’ve finished their first playthrough of Veilguard.)

Continue reading “November 2024 Update: Soldiering On” →

PICTURED: Splash art from Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story showing main character Jacqueline coming upon her daughter Aster and Aster’s babysitter Shruthi engaged in a game involving cat ears and makeup.

The following is an essay that I wrote in June of 2023 on Cohost. It was intended to mainly function as a value-add for a plea I was making at the time for people to purchase and review Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story on the various platforms on which it retailed, but it wound up being one of my favorite pieces of writing I’d done on that site. The piece focuses on two core pillars of Opportunity’s narrative that tend to receive disproportionate amounts of attention: its queerness (which tends to get downplayed) and its wholesomeness (which tends to get overemphasized). What I’d like to do here is first reproduce the essay in its entirety, and then in a brand-new section talk about what, if anything, has changed since I wrote it, while also expanding on some points I only briefly touched on.

To begin with, a quick refresher on what Opportunity is about:

With two young children, a full-time job, two student loans, and rent due every month, it’s no wonder that millennial single mother Jacqueline is struggling! She’s exhausted, she’s stressed, she’s overworked, and worse: she hasn’t gotten laid in over two years! But things begin to change after she reconnects with an old friend, who makes her a surprising offer…

Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story is a warm, lighthearted erotic visual novel exploring what it means to rebuild and reinvent yourself against a backdrop of late-stage capitalism. What do you do when you realize you haven’t been really happy for a long time, and what does it mean to be REALLY happy, anyways?

Continue reading “Opportunity and the Bona Fides of Queerness & Coziness (Expanded)” →

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