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.

Fast-forward to an evening (well, technically, early morning) in May of 2020. I was somewhat drunk and deeply in my feelings over the aforementioned friend, which of course led me to thinking about how very nice it would be if her and I were together instead of her and her actual husband. For some reason, though, that night my fantasizing kept bonking up against the inconvenient fact of her two small children – I’ve never wanted kids in my life in any form, and it’s not as though I could reasonably expect her to ditch them, even in my rosiest of drunken daydreams. This, naturally, led to me to think, well, wouldn’t it be nice if I were very rich (I am not very rich) and could PAY her to date me while keeping the kids at arm’s length? This, I decided, was a good fantasy, and I decided that, just for fun, ha ha, I would write quick-and-dirty descriptions of two characters in a theoretical game that just HAPPENED to greatly resemble her and I. (The character based on me, in addition to being a millionaire, just HAPPENED to have my build while being much more cut, and just HAPPENED to also be able to grow a full beard, which I have never in my life been able to manage.)

I did so, and found that looking at the descriptions gave me a deep sense of comfort, and decided, hey, what’s the point of having an artist that you regularly pay for art if you can’t occasionally tap them to illustrate your deeply cringe personal fantasies? So I sent Pacha the descriptions (without mentioning the context – I had THAT much dignity, at least) and asked if she’d be interested in taking a little break from AA/SB to noodle around with these concepts for bit. She jumped at the chance, and just like that, we blundered into the project that would become our main focus for the next two years.

DEVELOPING THE CONCEPT

At this point I should state that the characters that would become Jacqueline and Roman did not remain thinly-veiled stand-ins for my crush and myself for very long. In addition to Pacha not knowing who these characters had been based on (she had only my descriptions to work from, along with a few reference pictures of celebrities (Jacqueline has some Marion Cotillard and Lizzie Caplan in her DNA, while Roman got a hefty dose of David Harbour and Jeffrey Dean Morgan)), even if a character is initially based on a real person the second you introduce any kind of variation into their circumstances or background they very quickly become something different.

It also didn’t take me very long to realize that although this idea had been borne of a fuzzy slightly-self-pitying fantasy, it actually had potential to be ABOUT something – namely, sex work and a sort of Millennial wish-fulfillment – which would make the final product a lot more universally compelling but would also require much more thought and care than I had originally envisioned.

Here are a few details that changed from the original concept:

• Jacqueline’s husband was originally still in the picture, just working overseas. In early drafts I saw him actually being aware and supportive of her becoming a sex worker. I scrapped this concept for a couple reasons: first, a job that requires someone to go overseas would presumably pay well, and if Jacqueline was also bringing in some income that made her finding the idea of sex work attractive from a money standpoint that much less believable. Secondly, having her husband essentially be an observer of Jacqueline’s sexual fulfillment felt somewhat mean-spirited and a little close to cuckolding/NTR, which are fine as genres but not what I wanted to go for with this story. Instead, Jacqueline’s husband was rewritten as having run off in the night, and the “husband often away for work” idea was repurposed for Olive’s living situation.
• Luca and Aster were originally 8 and 4, respectively. I nudged the ages down (to 7 and 2.5) to make them more easy to differentiate in terms of speech and behavior. More to come on the kids in a future post!
• Some other names I considered for Jacqueline: Madeline, Sophie, Charlotte, Isabelle, Vivienne, Anastasia. I ultimately went with “Jacqueline” because it had the French sound I was looking for but also shortened nicely to “Jackie” as an affectionate short form to be used by close friends.
• Speaking of French influences, I should mention that a work that did NOT influence Opportunity despite having a great many overlapping themes and plot elements is Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film Belle de Jour, in which Catherine Deneuve plays a bored, sexually-repressed Parisian housewife who starts doing daytime sex work at a brothel catering to men with extremely specific kinks. The film is excellent and certainly WOULD have influenced Opportunity had it been given the chance, but sadly I only saw it for the first time this year.
• Roman had fewer names in the running: just Aleksei and Sasha. My background is Russian (on my mother’s side) and so I wanted some of that flavor for my Mary Sue, but I decided on Roman because it also had that sort of powerful imperial flavor that worked well with the whole sugar daddy vibe. I wound up using “Sasha” as a name for the cosplayer that Jacqueline and Olive wind up befriending in chapter 5.

SETTING

The decision to set Opportunity in a contemporary time period was heavily influenced by our previous project, As Above/So Below, which is set in the far-far-far-far-far-etc future. You see, the advantage of having a setting far in the future is that you can more or less do anything you want – however, the disadvantage is that you must do so very much more legwork in order to build a world that feels cohesive and whole. Fashion. Technology. Culture. Language. Economy. Worse still, AA/SB was set at a training institute for mech pilots where the students would all come from vastly different peoples and cultures, all of which needed to be invented from whole cloth. I was overwhelmed by all of it, unsure of how much I actually needed to define versus how much I could simply gesture at, unsure how much would actually make it into the game versus how much would remain forever in a worldbuilding document. I had so many ideas and no limits and it was PARALYZING. So, no wonder then that when deciding where and when to set Opportunity, which from the beginning was meant as a smaller, more achievable project, I chose to set it in the present day, in a small Vancouver Island township very much like the one I grew up in.

Said township wasn’t actually named in-text until the second chapter of the game was released – I had the name (Glacier Rest) down on paper, but simply forgot to work it into the script. Much like the town where I grew up, Glacier Rest is an obscenely picturesque island town of roughly 70,000, filled with “newlyweds and nearly-deads” and the various businesses and attractions those populations tend to support. It features a wealth of gorgeous parks and beaches as well as surprisingly-robust local scenes for music, art, and theatre, along with a great many touristy boutiques and eateries (such as the bakery-cafe of “Petty Indulgences”, where Jacqueline works before meeting Roman). The one major upgrade I gave Glacier Rest over my hometown came in the form of a much more functional public transit system. Glacier Rest, like a great many towns and smaller cities, has a difficult-to-escape gravity to it.

The present day is a wonderful time-saver when it comes to worldbuilding, because 99% of it has already been taken care of for you by human civilization. To give an example: in Opportunity‘s first chapter, we learn that Jacqueline has been through two different post-secondary education programs and as such has accrued two student loans. Without being told, a reader can infer a lot of information about Jacqueline based on their understanding of the world as it exists today:

• She is under an above-average amount of debt
• Having a lower-class income means she will be paying off that debt for the rest of her life
• The debt payments will severely limit how much money she has for paying for other goods and services
• The debt is a significant, near-overwhelming source of stress for her
• She is intelligent and driven enough to have completed post-secondary education in two different fields
• She was forced to borrow money to pay for her education, meaning that she does not COME from money

What a wealth of information the audience now has about our main character, based on one fact about her! This might all seem completely obvious to you, but that’s because you are very likely a member of the same society that Jacqueline is – that is, a late-capitalist hellscape in the so-called “developed world”. Because you share this cultural knowledge, I don’t have to explicitly point out that post-secondary education costs large amounts of money, that paying down even ONE student loan can take most of a person’s life if they only make a working-class salary, or the massive effect that much debt can have on one’s mental health and plan for the future. Imagine if I HAD needed to spend time defining all of those as being aspects of some kind of alien society!

One last thing to mention about the time and setting: if there’s any significant change I might make if I were to remake Opportunity today, it would be to give COVID-19 a significant role in the story. COVID being absent from Opportunity‘s narrative was a decision borne of self-serving optimism – in early 2020, it was conceivable that the pandemic, while horrible and frightening, might very well be fully resolved at some point, and as such I didn’t want the story to feel “dated” by references to masks and vaccines. There was also a great deal of escapist comfort to be derived from writing a story in which the characters had never heard one single thing about a novel coronavirus. However, the pandemic is still in full effect today (despite the best efforts of the world’s governments to memory-hole that fact), and I feel significant embarrassment at having contributed to the corpus of contemporary narratives wherein COVID is conspicuously absent. By the time I realized that COVID was here to stay, the story of Opportunity had progressed far enough that having COVID suddenly become a factor would have hijacked it completely, so I simply left it out. COVID has greatly altered my personal vision of what the core fantasy of Opportunity would look like (and, ironically, made the contemporary world a far less attractive setting for an escapism), and would absolutely need a place in any Opportunity-like story today.

THEMES

At its heart, Opportunity is about the liberatory power of sex work and the struggle to define yourself as more than your responsibilities within a capitalist society. That it ALSO happens to fulfill a specific embarrassingly earnest fantasy of mine is just icing on the cake.

I was lucky enough to be close friends with a woman who had worked as a highly-sought-after sex worker and sugar baby for years, and who helped me throughout the process of creating Opportunity as a playtester and sensitivity reader. After playing through the first chapter, she deemed it “sex worker escapism”, which I think fits it quite nicely, and is a niche I’ve attempted to pursue with my writing ever since. After all, there are precious few stories in the world where a sex worker is the main character, and even fewer of those in which said sex worker is not an object of disdain or pity. Even in porn and porn games, sex workers are most typically low-effort conquests or resources to be managed (a la various ‘trainer’/brothel games), and if a main character happens to do sex work it is typically incidental to a larger story and handled without much depth or care. It may be somewhat insufferable to say so, but I feel that a story in which mostly good things happen to a sex worker, in which she is not punished for the crime of selling sex through harassment by police or ostracization from her peers, that seriously considers her internality, goals, fears, and grants her moments of sincere joy and contentment, is actually quite rare, and, dare I say, necessary to put into the world. The escapism also works to produce a very flattering portrayal of a sex work client in Roman, as well – but I’ll save discussing that for when I go in-depth on his character.

All that being said, I must acknowledge the limitations of Opportunity being the relatively fluffy piece of slice-of-life escapist wish-fulfillment that it is – which is to say, the limits to which Jacqueline’s experience is generalizable to sex workers writ large. Jackie, by happy coincidence, only ever has sex with people she is genuinely attracted to, and never has to deal with the stresses of advertising for or vetting potential clients. Jackie receives a good amount of money predictably from her sex work, and her work puts her in no physical danger. She does not need to worry about accidental pregnancy or sexually-transmitted infections. Pursuant to my desire to not have the story turn into a puritan morality play, Jackie will not end the story in jail or dead in an alley (sorry, spoiler alert), and the government will not swoop in to tear her children away from her. I say all this not to backpedal on my position on sex work’s validity, merely to assure readers that I am aware that Jacqueline represents a relatively privileged subset of sex workers and that I would never dream of presenting her experience as universal. I’m saying this here because there is a nasty habit among consumers of progressive narratives to punish representation that does not account for every possible permutation of intersecting identity, and I’d like to get out ahead of that as early as possible.

I’ve seen some players refer to Opportunity‘s narrative as being one of ‘corruption’, and I’d like to push back against that a tiny bit. Not out of distaste (corruption stories are actually one of my favorite sub-genres of porn games, personally), but more because I don’t actually consider any of the characters in the story as being corrupted over time, per se. I like to think of it less as corruption and more as an increase in comfort of expression, if that makes sense. It is much, MUCH easier to find comfort and joy in one’s sexuality when one is not worrying about money, has a surplus of free time, and has a variety of attractive, attentive partners with which to experiment. That’s more of what’s happening in Opportunity, rather than a seedier, darker kind of slide into depravity (which, again, is a completely fine and enjoyable type of story to tell, it’s just not what I’m going for here.)

Despite it being in the very literal name of the game, sex work isn’t the ONLY thing that’s liberatory in Opportunity‘s narrative. The other thing that massively changes in Jacqueline’s life over the year that the story focuses on is her involvement in and the support she receives from the community around her. At the start of Opportunity‘s story, Jacqueline is in the throes of the kind of immiserating isolation forced upon so many young mothers today – all of her time is spent caring for her children and working at a job that barely covers her monthly bills, a job she only has time for thanks to her friendgroup generously providing her with free after-school childcare. Yes, she is supported by people she loves, but she has no time for herself, no time to experience life outside of service and toil. The generous salary she receives from Roman is only part of the fantasy, you see – the other part, arguably the even-more-crucial part, is getting to see what Jacqueline does with the freedom the money provides.

Over the course of the story, we see Jacqueline return to passions she had abandoned, like fashion and cosplay. This is reflected not only in explicit story moments, such as during her and Olive’s trip to Vancouver (which I only ever referred to as “the big city”, mostly as a joke for myself but also because Americans tend to get confused and upset about non-American place names) for a comic convention, but also implicitly through her many, MANY outfit changes throughout the story (fifteen in total, if you count “nude” and “wearing a towel” as outfits). We see her deepening her relationship with her already-close friends Olive and Juniper – not only sexually, but also by enmeshing herself in their lives in a way she never could have before. We see her making new friends – patching up her relationship with Juniper’s wife Rose, making an exciting professional connection in Kate, and somewhat-shakily reaching an understanding with Olive’s husband Clayton. We see that her ability to effectively care for and relate to her children increases dramatically. And, of course, we get to see her indulging her sexual desires repeatedly, in great detail. By the end of Opportunity, we see that the great joy of Jacqueline’s new life is not merely that she has money and a lot of good sex, but that she has taken advantage of the fact that she no longer needs to spend every waking moment struggling to survive in the best ways. “Liberation”, counter to a great many tiresome Randian polemics, is not a state of perfect self-sufficient detachment – it is a state of glorious, unthreatened care and involvement with the world that surrounds you. Jacqueline at the end of Opportunity is surrounded by friends and family who adore her, and whom she adores in turn, and this every inch as inextricable from the fantasy of the work as the sex or the money.

That does it for this portion of the Opportunity retrospective! Next time, we’ll start in on examining the game’s cast of characters, starting with Jacqueline and her children! 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 3: Jacqueline & Her Family

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