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 10^th 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.

INFLUENCES & INSPIRATIONS

Re:Maid (2015), MarbleSyrup

In autumn of 2016, I found myself in what some might describe as a liminal stage of my life. I had started practising professionally as a massage therapist in spring of that year, and while I enjoyed the work as much as it’s possible to enjoy work, the bloom had come off the rose and I was noticing that it left me severely creatively unfulfilled (especially when compared to my earlier career as a game designer). Shortly after my career as an RMT began, I got out of a long-term, very passionate, very very bad-for-me romantic relationship, the aftermath leaving me bitter, lonely, and thoroughly absent of purpose.

By the time autumn rolled around, I was bored, starting to build up surplus cash from my work but with nothing to spend it on, and in desperate need of a long-term distraction. Then, one evening, I found myself horny and nostalgic, so I navigated on over to Newgrounds’s adult game section to see what had changed since my last visit however many years prior. This brought me to MarbleSyrup’s ostensibly-maid-cafe-themed visual novel Re:Maid.

These days, I’m inclined to be charitable towards Re:Maid. Is it, in any objective sense, a GOOD pornographic visual novel? Well, no. Very little is actually done with the “maid cafe” conceit, there are only two romanceable characters and very little actual fucking – and what fucking there is is rendered with about as much skill as you would expect from someone releasing a Flash porno VN on Newgrounds in 2015. The writing has this weird quirk where it was either being written by a British weeaboo doing a very poor job writing a Japanese college student from a rural area OR an American weeaboo doing the same but who would occasionally sprinkle in incongruous Britishisms in an attempt at sounding erudite. I could never tell which. HOWEVER. The game is slick and functional and content-complete and consistent end-to-end, which is more than I can say for roughly 80% of the porn games I’ve played since I really started taking a professional interest in the genre. For a few guys who likely had very little prior game development experience making a free lightweight Flash VN in 2015, I think they acquitted themselves pretty well.

Back in 2016, I was not so easy-going, and as I clicked through I could feel a sneer playing across my face. Everything rubbed me the wrong way – the art, the writing, the pretension, the wasted opportunities. I couldn’t even crank off, I was so judgmental. And then, a strange, wriggly thought wormed its way across the gyres of my brain – the same thought that so very many ambitious imbeciles have before they spend possibly the rest of their lives chasing a creative obsession:

I Could Do Better.

There’s really wasn’t any coming back from that, in retrospect. I was perfectly primed, teetering on the precipice of a radical new direction in my life, and Re:Maid sent me tumbling over the edge.

The Client List (2011 television series), Lifetime

A few years back, I had a close friend who lived on the other side of the country who I would enjoy watching trashy television with. One day we happened upon The Client List and its premise of Jennifer Love Hewitt playing a massage therapist who starts performing sexual services after her husband runs out on her so that she can support her two kids. My friend happened to have done some full-service escorting work in the past, and I was a massage therapist, and so obviously we watched all twenty-five episodes.

Now, you might read that premise and think “huh! A single mother whose husband runs out on her, causing her to turn to sex work? That’s awfully similar to Opportunity‘s initial premise!” Astutely observed! Moreso than any other creative work, Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story is intended to be in direct conversation with The Client List.

The Client List is by no means a good TV show, but it IS a fascinating document. Produced as it was by the famously-conservative and creatively-bankrupt Lifetime Network, the show’s attitudes towards sex work and sex workers are predictably reductive and condescending, and it seems unlikely that any amount of consultation with actual sex workers (or massage therapists, for that matter) was done prior to shooting. However, there’s a funny thing that happens when writing characters, particularly in a long-format work like a TV show – characters have a tendency to act like, well, PEOPLE. When your premise calls for your charismatic leading lady to be both a sex worker AND a Lifetime-approved-positive-representation-of-modern-femininity, some interesting stuff happens with the script and its sympathies.

Riley Parks (Jennifer Love Hewitt’s character) is doing sex work, which (according to the understanding of 2012 Lifetime and its viewers) is Bad. However, she’s our leading lady, so the script can’t just call her stupid or evil or dehumanize her outright – as our protagonist, she’s allowed a concrete, sympathetic motivation for seeking risky-but-lucrative employment. She’s allowed to be shown both being proficient at and enjoying her work while not having it define the whole of her being. Riley is a daughter, a mother, a wife, a business owner, a friend, AND a sex worker.

Unfortunately, that’s about as much praise as I think the show warrants. Most of the rest of the cast are not afforded the same humanity as Riley, instead all falling into some form of broadly-drawn caricature (with the exception of Evan Parks, Riley’s brother-in-law, who is an interesting character in how he manages to suck shit at every turn). As if to compensate for its protagonist’s extra-legal occupation, the narrative has a major hard-on for cops as Well-Meaning Dispensers Of Justice – there’s even a multi-episode story arc about Evan going through the police academy (told you he sucked). The plot is held together by wires and string, the writing is clunky, the quality of the performances is… variable, and the whole thing is steeped in a miasma of Lifetime-network sexual politics. It’s the kind of thing you absolutely NEED to go into with the intention of dissecting or making fun of it, or else you’ll come away thoroughly miserable.

(Also, a nitpick from the massage therapy side of things – in one episode it’s revealed that The Rub (the combination regular-massage/sexual-services-massage parlour where Riley works) only has one “laundry day” every WEEK. This is INSANE. The Rub is shown to have roughly twenty regular employees, who we can assume work in morning/afternoon shifts throughout the week. Assuming they’re all working 3-5 shifts/week, that means 60-100 shifts are filled. Assuming each shift is 6 hours, that gives each employee time to see a maximum of 5 clients/shift, with a few minutes between each client to strip used sheets and prepare clean ones. A bare-minimum set of sheets for a massage consists of a headpiece cover, a bottom sheet, and a top sheet – this doesn’t include other linens that might be needed, such as towels. This means that, in order to accommodate the maximum possible number of weekly clients, they would need to keep FIVE HUNDRED three-piece sets of massage linens on-hand – which, again, doesn’t even begin to account for less-frequently-needed linens, or the possibility of linens being soiled or damaged outside of treatments. Storing that much linens would require the use of a large storeroom, and the used sheets (some portion of which have been cummed-on, remember) would essentially be marinating in their own filth for days (and taking up valuable space all the while). I’ve worked at a large clinic roughly the size as The Rub in the past, and we had a laundry service that would cart away our used linens and provide us with fresh ones DAILY. This is a lot of words to spend on a very small detail from a daytime drama from a decade ago that was cancelled after two seasons, but please consider that this has been eating a hole through me for years and could have been avoided with five minutes of consultation with an actual massage therapist.)

Anyways. All of this is to say that a lot of what I specifically attempted to make appealing or believable about Opportunity was in response to something I thought could have been handled better in The Client List. I’ll get more into this in a later essay, but it’s always rankled within me to think that sex workers would need to make do with The Client List as their most representative modern fantasy, and I hope that I was able to offer them a more appealing, sympathetic alternative.

Steven Universe (2014), Cartoon Network

I have a tremendous amount of love in my heart for Steven Universe as a towering artistic achievement, an amount that is dwarfed only by the nigh-unlimited amount of awe and respect that I possess for Rebecca Sugar and the rest of the team that somehow managed to see it through. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Steven Universe completely redefined what I considered to be the high-water mark of quality in a piece of media for me, in every regard. Perhaps the MOST impressive thing about Steven Universe is its seamless cohesion; every idea, every aesthetic decision, every little contribution working together to support the show’s central creative thesis*.

Okay, enough gushing. A Cartoon Network anchor show written to be consumable by tweens might seem like an odd source of inspiration for a pornographic narrative. However, there are three core features that I believe Steven Universe and Opportunity have in common.

First, Steven Universe, for all of its science-fantasy trappings, is a story that is first and foremost concerned with PEOPLE. Their personalities, their histories, their fears, their desires, how they see their place in the world. It’s been remarked in discussions surrounding the show that the titular Steven’s most powerful ability is his near-limitless supply of empathy, and what is empathy if not a profound and genuine interest in the internality of others? While I don’t think that Jacqueline has quite the same reserves of empathy as Steven, I attempted to make it clear that Opportunity‘s narrative itself had a similar level of interest in the internality and history of every named character.

Second, another of Steven Universe‘s core themes is specifically exploring the RELATIONSHIPS between people – how they start, how they continue, how they end, and how they can be repaired. While it’s hardly breaking new ground for a work of longform fiction to focus on character relationships, Steven Universe does a lot of interesting work with the concept, particularly through the lens of fusions – the magical union of Gem characters to create a new character that embodies the relationship experience of their constituent parts. Opportunity contains no magical fusion sequences (don’t think I wasn’t tempted), but I like to think the relationships between the main cast are treated with an equivalent level of care.

Third and finally, Steven Universe is a story about RADICAL SELF-DEFINITION. Almost every character introduced in the show’s story ends as a far different character by the time the end rolls around, and almost always that change has come about due to the characters making the active, often heroic choice to drastically alter the trajectory of their lives. And what is Opportunity if not a story about people drastically altering the trajectory of their lives? Sometimes your life’s trajectory is altered in service of ending an eons-old alien civil war, and sometimes it’s altered in service of making sure your kids can grow up and go to university.

*Let’s not talk about the Uncle Grandpa crossover episode, okay? Let’s just not.

HONORABLE MENTION: Hardcoded (2018-2024), yoplatz

I specifically remember playing Hardcoded‘s early build and having, for the first time ever, the realization that porn games could be GOOD. Like, not “good for porn games” good, ACTUALLY good. They could have bold art direction and good writing and engaging worldbuilding and likable characters AND wet-and-wild fucknasty sex! And, on top of all that, Hardcoded got popular – like, REALLY popular, as in multiple-features-in-mainstream-outlets levels of cultural impact. It turned out that there was an actual APPETITE for porn game experiences that strove for a higher level of quality than Meet ‘N’ Fuck: Magic Book! What a concept! Needless to say, it was incredibly inspiring to me to see an actual honest-to-Christmas example of a porn game so good that it literally changed public perception of the possible breadth and depth of narrative that porn games could offer.

HONORABLE MENTION: Sanguine Rose (2019), Dusky Hallows

Sanguine Rose gets a mention here not only because, like Hardcoded, it’s a porn game of such startling robustness and quality that it expanded my expectations of the genre as a whole, but ALSO because Hallows, the game’s writer/coder, is a True Homie who pitched the first chapter of Opportunity to what would soon become our shared publisher. Said publisher was instrumental in us being able to bring Opportunity to Steam, and thus turn what had previously been an expensive hobby into a self-sustaining sideline. Play Sanguine Rose! It fucks!

HONORABLE MENTION: The Discworld Series (1983-2015), Terry Pratchett

It’s not that there’s a direct line between my warmhearted sex-work romp and Sir Terry’s legendary body of work, but I felt it only appropriate to make SOME acknowledgement of the overwhelming influence his writing has had on mine. Pratchett’s writing is often discounted as genre humor, but for my money he’s one of, if not THE deftest, cleverest, and most insightful writers of any genre of the past century. Despite being set atop a quartet of colossal elephants who are themselves set atop a gargantuan space turtle, the Discworld of Pratchett’s stories is grounded by an abiding love for people and all of their idiosyncrasies.  He moves effortlessly between soaring mythopoetic verse and Python-esque surrealist comedy. He’s as inventive as Tolkien and as cutting as Wilde on his best day. Above all else, Pratchett’s writing resonates because of how obviously INTERESTED he is in the characters he writes and what they get up to – this, above all else, is something I’ve attempted to carry through into my own writing, that desire to make characters so alive and inviting that one can’t help but want to spend an entire afternoon seeing what they get up to. Sharp-eyed readers of both his writing and mine might have noticed that I quietly added a few of Pratchett’s better jokes to Opportunity‘s script – remember, it’s not “theft”, it’s “homage”.

That does it for this introduction to the Opportunity retrospective! Next time, I’ll actually start talking about the game itself, specifically how it was first conceived and how that concept evolved through the earliest stages of development! 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 2: Concept & Themes

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